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LOVE IN THE TIME OF MONIKA.
Monica and Harry, two young people seeking life and love, meet in a dingy café.
They decide to run away and travel the world living day by day.
They sustain themselves by eating wild mushrooms picked in the woods, fruit stolen from orchards, and even (Monica) a slice of roast taken from a villa buffet.
They spend the long summer days making love, lounging, talking, and swimming in the sea.
Monica lets her femininity, physicality, beauty, and desire to live and have fun run wild.
Until she confesses to Harry that she is pregnant.
At the end of the summer, they return to the city intending to formalize their relationship.
Instead, after a violent argument in which Harry accuses Monica of adultery (which she does not deny, confessing, in fact, to still love an old flame: Lelle), they break up.
The film ends with a flash-back in which Harry recalls the happy summer moments spent with Monica.
And a speedboat slowly moving away on the water.
There is no doubt that the film lives and stands almost exclusively on the (almost uninterrupted) presence on screen and the intense interpretive performance of Harriet Andersson.
According to Olivier Assayas, who compiled in a book his “Conversations with Ingmar Bergman”, Harriet Andersson's performance in “Monica and the desire” is one of the greatest actress performances ever witnessed by an audience.
Ingmar Bergman added:
...She has a love affair with the camera. The camera stimulates her, and she feels extremely stimulated by it. A very strange relationship....”
There is no doubt that her original, bold, scandalous, uninhibited acting, as a consummate actress, has left an indelible mark on the history of world cinema.
Olivier Assayas also writes:
"One of the extraordinary elements of the film is Harriet Andersson. Surely one of the greatest actresses ever.”
Bergman's blunt response: “It's true.”
Bergman himself (who, for some time, had been romantically involved with the actress) says:
"...If you see her in “Monica and the desire” and then in “Cries and Whispers”... I think she is... in short... one of the greatest actresses in the world.”
And again Bergman, dwelling, this time, on the actress's undeniable physical and aesthetic qualities:
"Harriet was very beautiful. She was nineteen. We made the film. It was a wonderful time.”
But it doesn't end there.
The Maestro goes well beyond in his hagiography of Harriet Andersson. He writes, in fact, in his autobiographical book Images: "Harriet Andersson is one of the geniuses of cinematography. Only a few rare examples are encountered on the tortuous journey through the jungle of this craft. Here is an example. Summer is over. Harry is not at home, and Monica goes out with Lelle. At the café, he plays the jukebox. In the swing's din, the camera turns toward Harriet. She shifts her gaze from her partner directly to the lens. Thus, an impudent direct contact with the viewer was suddenly established for the first time in cinema history,”
And so, we come to the famous look at the camera so much discussed and written about.
However, the film was not well received.
At least by critics. It had, instead, a fair amount of public success.
It was reviewed very discordantly by contemporary critics.
Especially by Italians, who were not too forgiving of the Swedish director.
Giacinto Ciaccio dismissed it by writing:
“A drama both bizarre, questionable, and moving.”
Mario Verdone called it: "A minor film,” nothing more than “a single, effective, study of a woman.”
Alfonso Moscato thought the comparison ....” between the nature and the soul of the girl excessive.”
The lukewarm reception it had in Italy was fortunately not the same as in other countries. It was balanced, for example, by the one received in France, especially by director-writer-critic Jean Luc Godard, who, after a retrospective organized by the French Cinematheque, rehabilitated it, claiming in “Cahiers du cinéma” that in that film more than any other, Ingmar Bergman established himself as the “filmmaker of the moment”
Adding emphatically in his enthusiastic review:
"Each of his films is born from a reflection of the protagonists on the present, explores this reflection through a kind of fragmentation of time, somewhat in the manner of Proust, but with greater force, as if Proust had been multiplied by Joyce and Rousseau together, and finally becomes a gigantic and boundless meditation starting from an instant. A Bergman film is, so to speak, a 24th of a second that transforms, expands for an hour and a half.”
"It is the world between two blinks of an eye, sadness between two heartbeats, the joy of living between two wing beats.”
Godard himself was fascinated by the sequence in which Harriet Andersson stubbornly stares into the camera, 5 years before Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) in La Strada:
One must see Monica at least for the extraordinary moments when Harriet Andersson, before going back to bed with someone she had dumped (Lelle, editor's note), looks directly into the camera with her laughing, bewildered eyes, taking the viewer as a witness to the contempt she feels towards herself for involuntarily choosing hell over heaven.”
And he called it: “the saddest shot in the history of cinema.”
And in concluding this note, I also want to add a personal observation on the unfortunate title attributed to the film by Italian distributors. Perhaps this beautiful film by the Master would have deserved a title, in Italian, less ... ambiguous (as critic Sergio Trasatti also succinctly defined it), perhaps more suited to a pornographic Scandinavian film shot in super8, than a film to be understood in the filmography of the greatest director of all time.
Probably, simply translating the beautiful Swedish title Sommaren med Monica into the simpler but more eloquent (in Italian) : A Summer with Monica.
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