It Rains on Our Love

Two young people try to protect a fragile love relationship on the margins of society against all pressures from established social institutions and their representatives. Although It Rains on Our Love is perhaps the most schematic of Bergman’s early films about adolescents in crisis, with the guardians and adversaries of young love appearing in near-allegorical form, it is also the least tortured. The scenes of idyll and refuge for persecuted young lovers, more fleeting and vulnerable in his other films, here have a warmth that Swedish critics greeted with positive relief after the “distorted sexuality” of Crisis earlier that same year. The good-father/bad-father dichotomy that will mark much of Bergman’s production is resolved here by having the compassionate narrator enter the action of the film as the couple’s defense attorney in the final trial scene. An overall tone of naiveté peppered with burlesque irony makes this one of the most optimistic of his early films.