Watch Summer with Monika For Free

Memorable, crazy movie

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I'd like to think everything will turn out alright for Harry (Lars Ekborg) and his little baby girl, because the young man had set up a future for his family by hard work and training in a school to make life better. I don't think, however, the same promise of a bright future exists for Monika (Harriet Andersson) as she is presented as very self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and too immature to accept responsibility for a child born out of a liberated, care-free summer. When they meet for the first time it is in a low-rent café in Stockholme. She chats him up and pretty much initiates their relationship by provoking a date to the theatre to see a romance. They are entrapped in unflattering, low-income, blue-collar jobs (he helps pack and deliver boxes, with the employers/employees haranguing him often about his poor performance and work ethic, while she deals with the male co-workers at a green-grocery always hitting on her), and she urges him to "escape" with her to parts unknown in a boat his father owns (Harry's father has stomach problems (cancer?) and remains very ill) at the end of spring as summer is about to begin. During this summer, the two lovebirds are on their own, with gathered clothes, a small bit of food, a little drink, and enough petrol to travel for a bit. A former lover (it is implied at the start she's a harlot, and as the movie closes, proof emerges this is the case) just causes Harry a lot of grief, attacking him at one point while he's walking home after a date with Monika and later discovering their boat, attempting to burn it along with dumping their items (clothes and such) in the water! When this goon is later found in bed with Monika, Harry's never the same…that Monika would not only do that but imply love, I can't imagine the anguish Harry felt.There are three chapters in Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika: before, during, and after that summer following Harry and Monika. The difference between the teenage lovers is that Harry puts others before himself (Monika and the baby) while Monika only thinks about herself. Rent is due and she chooses a dress instead, the baby is handed off to Harry's aunt because Monika wants nothing to do with her, and once Harry is off working with a crew of engineers she carries on with a number of affairs. At one point, Monika mentions that she wants to have fun while she still has her youth, and there are plenty of moments where she pretties up for guys, with Harry oblivious to her betrayal. Obviously, Bergman's camera has a way of enhancing the idyll of that blissful summer as the kids are off getting lost in a fantasy, but the very beginning also heightens Stockholme due to the stark beauty of the B&W photography. It is when the material emerges out of the idyll that reality is all so assertive. You can only stay away from reality so long: Harry realizes this and moves forward while Monika pursues another path towards fantasy. I asked myself at the end where Monika will be once her nice body and good looks fade, and the alternating door of boys and young men halts. I again picture Harry, with another woman who will see all of his attributes and accept a love and affection he will surely provide, and his baby girl escaping the one-room apartment as his career gets him out of the slums. He is humbled but I think he's a survivor.

Two young people, stuck in pointless jobs, find each other. Monika is in love with love and Harry is a willing partner for her. He is simple and kind and doesn't see the pitfalls ahead. She is the aggressor at all times, and he is so smitten it makes no difference. The two quite their jobs and steal a boat to take off to who knows where. The enjoy themselves for a while. However, a young man who Harry has had trouble with before, sets the boat on fire and throws all their supplies and clothes overboard. They put out the fire but it is an event they can't overcome. It is also getting cold and Monika is pregnant. Harry is the mature one and tries his best but she is still a child with a huge streak of selfishness. She feels her life should be like in the movies (Harriet Andersson does a magnificent job. At times she is pretty. At others, very plain). When the real world hits, Harry's taking responsibility for his new family (a little girl is born) is a big bore to Monika. While he studies and trying to better himself and ultimately bring more money to the family, she is having men up to the apartment. She says she is in love and shows her disdain in every way possible. This is a slice of life thing with real human beings doing what human beings do. Sometimes that means they cut each other's hearts out. Since the entire foundation of their love was based on an empty need for affection, it stands to reason at some point it will all come tumbling down.

This is Bergman at his most sublime. He is self-aware again when he makes Monika utter "You're like a film, Harry" (paraphrased) - and this is the point where I knew "Summer of Monika" was going to be a great film. I was a little disheartened when I was watching "Secrets of Women" (I'm not a big fan of the movie); I did get enraptured by "Smiles of a Summer's Night" but it still wasn't him at his most adroit.Now, finally getting to watch this movie reminded me how amazing he was. The framing, the chiaroscuro lighting and all based on the study of what seems like two pariahs in their own society; Monika, who works as a grocer doing menial tasks to earn a living and Harry who works also, but who has a Dad who has ailments and a Mother who deceased when he was 8. Monika feels frightened in her own kinship and Harry is ready to go adrift into the Summer. They both become one, and then we segue into their departure to another place. "If they want to keep us apart, then we'll leave them" as Monika says, proving that we're still watching adolescents who want to free them selves from the frustration of conformity. Monika was abused by her Father and made an instinctive decision to go with him to the other side. As the movie goes on consecutively, we're then treated with the views beyond the sea. The cinematography is a marvel, as we see from the POV shots which set up the beauty. I always think that the set up of window dressing, will give us plenty of time to become accustomed to the life akin to turbulence and anguish; in the ending, he reminisces on this, when he mirrors into himself parallel into his past... he is unfortunately occupied with the Baby, and now sees nothing of prudence to look forward to.It is a deep, darkening and rather imbued experience through the struggles mixed between the life going through swimmingly. Bergman also gives us a sense of a celestial body with the shots of the sky, which seem very emblematic, although I'm not sure what of. It is one of those excursions that subjects you to a fresher form of the bittersweet. The closeups are not made from the caricatures of their characters - when Harry gets a closeup shot he contorts his face with more emotion, and a real sense of a saturnine guy, who was tamed by a Woman, and is now toiled with the trouble of premature adulthood. It doesn't preach it, but it makes you feel it; he becomes like her Father eventually and it then veers away from the path that we can all aspire for... the feeling of waves swaying back and forth and the freedom to do whatever you want. As Monika says "I don't ever want to go away from there" (paraphrasing), and yes, it is just one of those woes. "Summer with Monika" is not a cutesy, rom-com like you would be used to it. It is a Ingmar Bergman romance - watch his other movies like "Summer Interlude", "Through a Glass, Darkly" and "Persona" and then watch this movie that was made 2 years after "Summer Interlude" and predates the latter; you will be seeing a spectacle and a truth, perfection is now nonsense. Apart from the perfections of this one man's fable.

Summer With Monika is an engaging and really rather well made film about two young people refusing to confront life's problems before going on to run away with each other from each of their respective troubles. Where they escape to is a safe haven that they believe will cover up certain life shortcomings, legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's 1953 film effectively a cautionary tale about the pratfalls or dangers of escape into alternate states of mind or being seemingly cut off from the rest of the world; the troubled waters that the inability to deal with issues that need affronting lead onto, here born out of isolating oneself from society that only further leads to nastiness and dishevelment. I read that people mark it in particularly high regard as a "kitchen sink drama", perhaps the world's first, indeed only, kitchen sink drama that is almost wholly set within the confines of a wood. In essence, the film is a remarkably well played romance picture; but with a biting edge of dread and rebellious rage, between two people not coming together out of cultural indifference's, but classist and marginalised ones; people whom bid to turn the tables on the perpetrators of their sufferings, an event which spawns a taut and pent-up piece rich in drama and tragedy and is certainly worth seeing. We begin in a docklands area of Sweden's capital Stockholm, the film's two principal characters existing in very close proximity as they live out their lives of occupying that of a dead end job by day and a downtrodden life at home by night. Young Harry (Ekborg), a boy working within some kind of private company specialising in proclaim production and distribution, seems dwarfed by the rest of the world as he rides along a busy road on his motorcycle going about his business; a chance encounter at a café with the equally young titular Monika (Andersson) leads to an exchange seeing Harry struggle to activate a lighter so as to ignite her cigarette; a kind of antithetical exchange to a character in a film that features the cocksure male waltzing into a bar (or café or similar place of nourishment) and immediately being able to turn on the charm in lighting a woman's cigarette before the dialogue begins. Harry is nervous, that sense of having not before been around many girls prominent – that sense of being unable to function in Monkia's presence equally so.However, their quaint exchange does, in fact, lead to a date at the cinema; a rendez-vous which goes well in that they kiss at the be all and end all of it contrasted only by Monika's sitting in her seat in floods of tears at the finale of the film grossly contrasted to that of Harry's more nonplussed reaction – where the two are highly indifferent in this sense, one thing they appear to crave over all else is escape from what they would have been suffering at home had they not gone as well as the mere item of each other's company. In each of their respective lives, issues with authoritarian figures and the severe disenchantment with working to a fixed schedule which does not at all fit in with either youngster's ultimate wishes dominates proceedings; Monika detests her life at home with her pre-adolescent younger brothers and often drunk father, the sexual harassment at work at the hands of her male co-workers a further straw on the already creaking back of a rather worn camel.Their deciding to 'up' and leave everything behind, in doing so stealing Harry's father's boat, sees the pair of them escape the world they inhabit and dart off to a sunny, isolated and rather beautiful island a motor boat ride from the mainland. The island is their Eden, a rock in the sea occupied by the cries of equally free and soaring gulls as well as jagged rock formations that have been carved naturally out of the edges of this stretch of land. This island is now housing two young and free people occupying a place free of anything they take a disliking to: where there were time-frames and rules, there is the ability to oversleep; where there was the danger of being caught by respective people in that of parental roles, there is the freedom to engage in frank sexual escapades without worry; where there was a grip they were forced to live in at the hands of confrontative and authoritarian figures, there is the ability to work together and defeat people of this confrontative and authoritarian ilk at their own game.Feeding off of Bergman's previous film, Summer Interlude, the film is peppered with this wry sensation of things just not going anywhere in particular other than to rife emotional anarchy; a sensation established when it appears Harry and Monika are aware of what might be brooding back home; their money situation and what lurks in the future as they ponder just how long they can keep this up, but do not appear to have much in the way of answers for now. These two characters exist where it is they spontaneously travel to, but that is all they do; there is no greater extent of a plan amidst their actions nor the proceedings, merely a wallowing in a newfound sense of independence and strength that only delays the inevitability of having to eventually confront one's problems – problems which systematically opens up routes to all sorts of newfound ones that the film additionally goes on to include. The film, predating that of the likes of the equally substantial Badlands and everything which came along as a result of that, is a fine character driven drama about people caught living in a state of stasis away from reality that they mistake for life's answer.