Summer with Monika

Critics touted Summer with Monika as Ingmar “Bergman’s most erotic film” for its theme of a young man’s sexual awakening and scenes of nudity on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. But this summer interlude is surrounded by some of the bleakest commentary of Bergman’s early cinema, in a city captured in all its shadows and empty light by the expert cinematographer Gunnar Fischer. Monika (Harriet Andersson), a restless, sexually harassed vegetable seller, and her more bourgeois boyfriend, Harry, take off in his father’s boat for the islands. There she teaches him how to dance, make love, and steal vegetables, and they dream of a family.