"Sommarlek" (literal translation: "summer play" or "summer frolic") is seen by many as the true beginning of director Ingmar Bergman's career. Abandoning his traditional, often unlikeable, male protagonists of his earlier efforts, in this film he casts a female lead to act out a story from his own youth. It was a brilliant maneuver that proved to be a huge, career-defining success as Bergman was now able to explore more sensitivity and sentimentality, not to mention aesthetic beauty, through the female viewpoint. And the actress herself, Maj-Britt Nilsson, does an amazing job of covering the entire spectrum of joy and despair.
The story begins on the stage of a ballet rehearsal, the night before the big show of Swan Lake. Our heroine "Marie" (Maj-Britt Nilsson) is 38 years old which in ballet terms is practically in the grave. Certainly in terms of emotion she is presented as almost a preserved corpse, beautiful but utterly drained of life. An accident shuts down rehearsal and she leaves to go home but takes an unexpected detour on a boat which takes her to an idyllic little island where she spent a summer of her youth 13 years prior.
This is where the magic of Maj-Britt Nilsson's acting shows itself. The youthful "Marie" is so thoroughly playful, happy and childish that I literally had to pause the film to check if it was really the same actress. It is. And immediately the suspense is set: how does such a happy-go-lucky young girl turn out to be the jaded painted relic we saw on the ballet stage?
What follows is a love story that's almost ridiculous in its perfection, but that's the point. As Marie says, it feels like being inside a soap bubble. Bergman and his filming crew made excellent use of the sights of summer (even though the typical Swedish summer is barely 2-3 weeks long) to convey a fantasy in the natural world.
Ultimately the audience knows it must somehow return to the dark stage of the present, and so psychologically this cute love story has the air of a mystery all the way through. This is my favorite part of the film, the way it's implied that the love story will end, and thus there's no need for contrived conflicts and cartoonish peril. Yes, there are shadows of malice but these shadows are subtle. The screech of an owl (announcing the impending end of summer) accompanied by Marie's sudden inexplicable terror, and a shift in cinematography to a darker, more sinister look-this is the kind of subtle, artistic foreshadowing I'm talking about.
In the last part of the movie there are some excellent monologues, all done in the quiet darkness of Marie's dressing room. Certain lines are so poetic you'll want to memorize them, such as "It's like being a painted doll on strings. If you cry, the paint runs..." And to me that's where the film, and Maj-Britt Nilsson, really deliver. The last line (which I won't ruin!) ends on a cryptic note which makes you want to watch the whole film again.
"Sommarlek" is a great film, not just as a historical marker for Bergman's career but as a standalone work of cinema. I would compare it to the Max Ophuls masterpiece which would come 4 years later, "Lola Montès" (1955). Both films give us a lavish epic focusing on a caged woman facing the memory her wild & free past, but in this case the "lavish epic" is wonderfully contained on a tiny island over a few fleeting weeks of summer.
