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Fantastic!

An Exercise In Nonsense

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Honestly, I have no idea why did I take this movie at all. After only few minutes I was at the edge of giving up o it. Movie is black and white, really slow, about ballerina and I'm allergic to ballet, and on top of it all it's Bergman who is known to be boring. I'm against prejudice, but mostly unaware how much I'm susceptible to it. Exactly what I specified as reasons to write off this movie as unwatchable makes it a masterpiece. You just have to relax, give over to it, reject pre-formed thoughts and enjoy art. The moment I stopped hating it movie enchanted me. After rehearsal is delayed for the evening, ballerina goes to stroll around nearby island where she spent summer as young girl and fell in love for the first time. She just visits spots from her past and remembers. Story is simple and slow, but strong and deep. Acting is unbelievably emotional. Camera and directing are fantastic. I felt that authors gave special attention and love to every frame. Every cadre is masterpiece of black and white photography. In last few decades life speeds up more and more and cinematography follows. Today's generations are trained to watch complicated thrillers, extreme sex and violence, cheap humor, sitcom romance and stories that move in speed of light. Film more and more becomes cheap entertainment without meaning. Movies like this one are here to remind us why is cinematography considered one of arts.9/10

While waiting for the night rehearsal of the ballet Swan Lake, the lonely twenty-eight year-old ballerina Marie receives a diary through the mail. She travels by ferry to an island nearby Stockholm, where she recalls her first love Henrik.Bergman later reflected, "For me Summer Interlude is one of my most important films. Even though to an outsider it may seem terribly passé, for me it isn't. This was my first film in which I felt I was functioning independently, with a style of my own, making a film all my own, with a particular appearance of its own, which no one could ape." Indeed, this is a landmark film for Bergman. We see his early use of "summer" as a recurring theme, his stark use of black and white that would define him for a generation... and even the use of "Swan Lake", which may prefigure his love of "Magic Flute" in some way. Bergman brought a visual style to film I have never seen elsewhere and never will. He is the master, and it all begins with "Summer Interlude".

The film starts & it ends; but it leaves the viewer fraught with amorous catharsis in the end. The scenes where the ballerina & her lover spend time in love-making are the purest specimens of love that can ever be found on screen. Their love bloom in such innocence & harmlessness that we find it hard to accept that a simple jump from a rock would stop the throbbing of Henrik's heart for ever & bring their love to an abrupt end. Thereafter, the way Marie volitionally builds a protective wall around herself to remain normal & the way it's blown up by a strange diary that she receives one day which forces her legs to trudge on her favourite land where she used to walk with Henrik hand in hand are portrayed with adept finesse.

Among outstanding film directors there are those who crash in with debut features that show something of the full extent of their talent (Satyajit Ray with "Pather Panchali", Neil Jordan with "Angel" and of course Orson Welles with "Citizen Kane") and those like Ingmar Bergman who creep into the scene with films that are little less than mediocre, but who develop slowly, almost unobtrusively, giving only occasional hints of the glories to come. Bergman first came to notice as the proficient scriptwriter for Alf Sjoberg's "Hets", a 1944 shocker with echos of "The Blue Angel". Sjoberg's direction is impressive with much use of expressionist shadows and angles. The strange thing about Bergman's directional debut, "Kris", two years later is what little he appeared to have absorbed from his mentor. "Kris" is a very two dimensional work that could have been made by almost anyone. This was followed by several similar apprentice works which again give very little indication of what was to come. I would date the emergence of the original Bergman voice from the appearance of "Summer Interlude" in 1951. Although on the surface this appears to be a very conventional tale of an idyllic romance cut short by a tragic twist of fate, the sort of youth/love/death cocktail that was the mainstay of so much Hollywood drama ("Kings Row", "Love Story" and "Dead Poets Society"), the treatment is often very personal in a way that we can almost feel an innate artist struggling to express something beyond the superficial. It opens with a visually stunning series of still-life shots of the sort that Ozu always inserted between each short dramatic scene. We immediately feel this is a film that is demanding to be taken seriously. When the ballerina heroine takes a boat to the archipelago where thirteen years before she met the young man who was to become the love of her life, memory is unleashed and we relive in flashbacks her past happiness. Sometimes Bergman is in complete control of his material as when the ballerina leaves the boat and uneasy memories seem reflected in the sound of the wind and there is a silent encounter with a mysterious elderly woman whose path almost touches hers - a device he was to use to even more chilling effect years later when Liv Ullmann passes an elderly lady in the corridor to an apartment flat in "Face to Face". In other places his command is less certain and borders on cliché - when the doomed young man speaks of his premonition of something dark, and indeed the shot of a black cloud a moment after the accident that is to prove fatal. Bergman also makes the mistake of sometimes cluttering the narrative with supporting characters which add very little to the forward flow - the rather tiresome behind the scenes workers at the theatre. Although the film is a romantic tragedy it differs from the works of his central period in the way it comes to terms with life's misfortunes. The ballerina learns from her memories that her life has a continuation, that it is still possible to forge new relationships. Bergman was to regain something of this confident belief in the worthwhile qualities of life in later works like "Cries and Whispers" and "Fanny and Alexander" but not until he had become resigned to rather than angered by God's silence. It is perhaps significant that in "Summer Interlude", where he had not quite sorted out his responses to life or the medium in which he was working, the most powerful scene of all is where the ballerina rails at God's silence after her lover has been taken from her and craves for the opportunity to spit at God should he appear. There is not a single scene that expresses anything like this that I can recall in Hollywood drama. It indicates more clearly than anything else in Bergman's output up to this point the path he was about to take in expressing his dark vision of the world, one in which the conventions of commercial cinema were to have no place.