Film Freak Central

Summer with Monika (1953) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommaren med Monika
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell
screenplay by Per Anders Fogelström
directed by Ingmar Bergman

click to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of Early Bergman, Summer with Monika is The Big One--the international hit that established the striving Swede's cred as a major filmmaker. The irony is that it's among the slightest of his works. Its notoriety is mainly the result of a promotional campaign selling it as a sex film, using imagery that suggested a nudie pic rather than a melancholy (and cautionary) rumination on life, love, and gender relations. Of course, it wasn't just the trenchcoat brigade that turned out in force for a movie that was at one point evocatively retitled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl(!). In fact, Monika was the one that made Woody Allen a lifelong Bergman fan. And it left a huge impression on Jean-Luc Godard, who, in 1958, wrote that Monika is "the most original film by the most original of directors," arguing that Bergman's loving photography of Harriet Andersson predated (and thus eclipsed) Fellini's widely lauded use of Guiletta Masina in a neo-realist mode in Nights of Cabiria, and that it surpassed in craft (mais oui!) Roger Vadim's employment of Bardot in And God Created Woman.

Summer Interlude (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommarlek
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjelin, Annalisa Ericson
screenplay by Herbert Grevenius and Ingmar Bergman
directed by Ingmar Bergman 

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer 1951's Summer Interlude offers a glimpse of Ingmar Bergman's later career in embryonic form. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a sexy, precocious teenager in love, and if that doesn't sound very Bergman-esque to you, know that she also plays a wary, regretful dancer approaching the functional end of her career at the Stockholm Royal Opera. The story darts forwards and backwards in time as the dancer, Marie, recalls an ill-fated love affair on the Stockholm archipelago while considering the status of her current relationship, a tentative affair with a newspaper hack who doesn't deserve her.

The Phantom Carriage (1921) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Astrid Holm, Tore Svennberg
screenplay by Victor Sjöström, based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf
directed by Victor Sjöström

by Bryant Frazer The Phantom Carriage, a seminal achievement in silent filmmaking from that other great Swedish auteur, Victor Sjöström, is a stern, supernatural moral drama that rails against social problems of the day by enlisting an emissary from the Great Beyond to lecture the feckless, abusive protagonist on what a rotten shit he is. Sjöström remains best known internationally for his later Hollywood films, made with the likes of Lillian Gish and Greta Garbo, but The Phantom Carriage already testified to genius behind the camera as well as in front of it. When the movie finished playing, I picked up the disc's keepcase and squinted at it, in all my ignorance, to determine who so expertly essayed the central character of the alcoholic David Holm. When I read the answer (Sjöström himself), I wanted to fling the box across the room. Show-off.

My Life as a Dog (1985) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Mitt liv som hund
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Brömssen, Anki Lidén, Melinda Kinnaman
screenplay by Lasse Hallström & Reidar Jönsson & Brasse Brännström & Per Berglund, based on the novel by Reidar Jönsson
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Angelo Muredda Before Oscar powerbrokers Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein entrusted their yearly contenders to can't-fail Stephen Daldry, there was Lasse Hallström. A three-time Academy award nominee whose Chocolat is still roundly (and somewhat unfairly, given the company of trash like Crash) dismissed as one of the most undeserving Best Picture nominees of recent years, Hallström best encapsulates the notion, popular in Oscar-watching circles, of the "fifth nominee": the uncelebrated contender who presumably just made the cut. Consecutive star-studded nonstarters like The Shipping News and An Unfinished Life--which, lest we forget, quasi-romantically paired a maimed Morgan Freeman with the existentially-troubled bear who gored him--have dimmed his reputation considerably since then, but Hallström has nevertheless assured himself a strange place in American filmmaking (not least because he is Swedish) as simultaneously one of the most-awarded and least-loved directors of the Miramax era of upmarket indies.