The narrator at the beginning of this film mentions it's a comedy, and while the film which follows is hardly that, maybe he's referring to the laughable choices we sometimes make in life when young, because that's what this crisis seems to be about. It's either that or the crisis Bergman himself was facing as a struggling first-time director. Anyway, in the film, a young woman has been raised to the age of 18 in a small town by her adoptive mother, and is being courted by her mother's lodger, who while annoying, boring, and older, at least seems like a decent guy who cares for her. Enter her birth mother, who wants to take her to Stockholm to work in her beauty salon, as well as her birth mom's younger boyfriend, who is a creepy and disturbing lothario. The choice is thus between town/adoptive mom/nice guy, vs. city/birth mom/ladies man, and the film sets it pretty much up in those black and white terms.
One exception to that is how the film shows selfish vs. selfless love, and we find that most of it (or maybe all of it?) is at least partially the former, which was interesting. I also appreciated how the film confronts adoptive vs. birth parent rights, with the adoptive mom asserting herself, though that doesn't really develop much from there, since the young woman is old enough to make her own decisions.
Most of the scenes felt pretty generic and not all that compelling, but there were some exceptions. I loved the scene at the ball when the youth rearrange the furniture in the next room, then improvise some modern music and dance wildly, to the consternation of the older folks trying to listen to an opera singer. There is also a lovely scene when the adoptive mom is lying sleepless on a train, and remembering moments from the past. Bergman also gets a little zinger in on men when a woman in the beauty parlor quotes Catherine the Great as saying once you've had 10,000 men, you find that there isn't a whole lot of difference between any of them.
Unfortunately, despite solid performances from the cast, the film suffers mainly because of its script, which is melodramatic and simplistic. The craziest thing was the signature move we find that the playboy puts on women. He tells them he's killed his girlfriend, wants to turn himself into the police, and may shoot himself ... and apparently this is an approach that gets them into bed. (What?) The film also suffers from a lack of clarity and a wandering in tone, complete with an oddly jaunty soundtrack in places, and the young director is to blame for this. He himself commented in 1973 that "If someone had asked me to film the phone book, then I would have done it. The result might have been slightly better. I knew nothing, couldn't do anything, and felt like a crazy cat in a yarn harness," and the result was the studio sending in Victor Sjöström to help supervise him through the chaos. As Bergman idolized the man, that must have been very tough for him. Despite all of this, the film is not awful or anything, but it is decidedly average, and for Bergman completists only.
