Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 24, No. 12. 1961.
Summertime
Summertime
This is one of Bergman's "Summer" films, in which he continues his exploration of young love. Summer Interlude is an almost wholly lyrical film and its portrait of the young lovers finds Bergman in his most tender mood (despite some characteristic, and perhaps intrusive, symbolic elements involving a diabolical ballet master). Gunnar Fischer's luminous photography gives the film a rare visual elegance, especially in the holiday scenes and the interiors showing the Stockholm Ballet in Swan Lake. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays with much youthful charm as the dancer Marie—another aspect of womanhood as seen through Bergman's searching eye.
One summer evening, four women, each married to one of four brothers, sit and reminisce as they wait for their husbands to arrive on the boat from Stockholm. One recalls how her marriage was temporarily interrupted by the arrival of a past lover; a second tells of her student days in Paris and an idyllic romance with a young painter; a third laughingly recalls how she and her husband were forced to spend a night in a broken lift. The film ends with the youngest member of the group starting off on her own adventure . . .
Here, in Kvinnors Vantan (Waiting Women), 1952, we find Bergman in a generally more relaxed mood. It might almost be termed a "tragicomedy," for although the mood is intermittently serious, this shrewd study in female psychology is laced with acid wit. The 20 minute episode in the lift is a tour de-force of sophisticated irony (apart from being very funny) and is played for all it's worth by Dahlbeck and Bjornstrand. The cast, in fact, is one of the most brilliant yet assembled by its director, and stories neatly dovetail into each other to make up a most civilised entertainment.
It is here that we see the Bergman troupe starting to materialise —the credits read like a list of friends names. Photography by Gunnar Fischer, music by Erik Nordgren with Anita Bjork, Eva Dahlbeck, Maj-Britt Nilsson, Gunnar Bjornstrand and Jarl Kulle. From now on, Bergman works with much the same nucleus of actors and actresses, adding a new face now and again but always including some of the old team.