‘Summer With Monika’: Ingmar Bergman’s masterful exploration of gender, romance and capitalism
Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman has an impressively large oeuvre, with many of his movies making their way onto lists of the greatest films ever made, from The Seventh Seal to Persona. His career spanned decades, and over these years, he experimented with innovative techniques, such as avant-garde montages and references to the artificiality of cinema. Concerning the content of his work, Bergman also started to feature more female characters as protagonists, prioritising themes like the shackles of patriarchy, capitalism and the expectations placed on women.
One of his most striking explorations of gender came in 1953’s Summer with Monika, which featured Harriet Andersson as the titular character. It’s a complicated movie that is often misinterpreted – it’s not uncommon to hear viewers call Monika the villain of the film, accusing her of being unfaithful and selfish. While she cheats on her boyfriend and acts in ways that prioritise herself, the story is not as black and white as this reading suggests.
The movie depicts capitalism (which perpetuates patriarchy) as the main villain due to its restrictive nature, threatening to tear Monika’s life and ambitions apart. When we meet the young character, she is at an awkward place in her life. She has outgrown living at home, which is a small, cramped space that possesses all the qualities of domestic misery. Her father is abusive and reliant on alcohol, creating a horrid atmosphere for everyone in the house. Monika’s mother is left to care for the children despite hardly having the resources to do so.
All that Monika wants is to leave home and start a new life for herself, independent of the confines of domesticity and the expectations placed on women to serve husbands and children. She’s young and restless, hopelessly attracted to the glamour of the Hollywood films she manages to catch at the cinema. It’s here that she goes on a date with Harry, portrayed by Lars Ekborg, whose life working a boring job isn’t very exciting, either.
The working-class pair decide to run away to start better lives, at least for the summer. They spend hours by sun-beaten expanses of water and rocks, lazing on their boat and making love. Summer With Monika soon became controversial because of its lax attitude to sex and nudity. While it is tame compared to today’s standards, we see the pair naked from behind, which shocked many audiences. Still, the image of Andersson with her shirt pulled off her shoulders to reveal a considerable amount of chest remains one of the most indelible of the 1950s, advertising the film as an erotic tale of a sensual summer filled with adventure and escape.
There’s much more to the film than that, though. The eroticism is soon replaced by the bleak realities of being a woman during the ‘50s, where expectations such as motherhood weighed down heavily on young girls. Monika and Harry return home and discover that they’re expecting a baby. No longer is this a film about an idyllic summer romance. This is now a tale of one woman’s quest for autonomy and freedom from the cycle of domesticity. Her initial plan to escape home lands with her accidentally forming a new family of her own, suddenly thrusting her into the role of a wife and mother, something she certainly doesn’t want.
As a result, Monika cheats on Harry and eventually abandons him and their baby, not yet ready to settle into the kind of life that she sees as suffocating and restrictive. Bergman attempts to make us empathise with Monika’s situation, although some viewers still side with Harry. We’re not meant to hate one and side with the other. However, we’re meant to see the hopelessness of their situation.
For Monika, growing up in a tense and abusive household has left her wanting to escape, to live a life far removed from what she has experienced. She wants to dance, to flirt, to enjoy romantic flings, to not worry about entering the very set-up that has made her so miserable. She doesn’t want to have to resort to prostitution, a likely occupation for her to undertake to survive as an autonomous woman.
Harry also wants to live a life unchained, but it seems as though he is more ready to accept capitalism’s oppressive system than Monika. She rebels against conformity, hurting him in the process, but by doing so, Bergman only emphasises the dire nature of the couple’s circumstances. Summer with Monika is one of the filmmaker’s most compelling dissections of womanhood and easily one of his greatest films.
