SUMMER INTERLUDE (1951)
d: Ingmar Bergman

The previous Bergman films we've watched have seemed incomplete, unfinished. SUMMER INTERLUDE is mastered in every detail, fluid. It is not only complete, but its central sequence is nearly transcendent in its effectiveness.

The core of the film is an extended flashback, the story of a first love. It is the longest extended sequence of anyone being happy in any Bergman we've seen so far. Previous characters experienced happiness only in its lack, or only so briefly as to make it cruel in comparison with life's endless misery. Marie and Henrik are genuinely, unguardedly happy, and the film's beauty is in its ability to make us feel their happiness fully.

You can't help but being in love along with Marie and Henrik. The film portrays the whole of the event, such that you feel the love story, but at the same time grasp its transience. You know it's not going to last, not merely because the framing story tells us so, but because first loves don't last. In TO JOY I felt compassion for a character I found essentially unlikeable. In SUMMER INTERLUDE, I was moved to believe in a first love I knew was going to end.

This is a God's eye authorial point of view, and yet it is engaged, rather than aloof. There is a level of sincerity here largely missing from modern films.

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