One of the great postwar films of the broken youth genre. Up there with Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS. Inspired a model of urban realism for the French New Wave, and I can’t say enough good things about it. Something I really like about the story is how it uses a seasonal cycle to express youth rebellion and maturation. Teen lovers meet in spring. Escape to dream spaces in summer. Get disillusioned in fall. Become adults during winter. Aronofsky uses seasons in a similar way in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000). Hope and fantasy in these films are shown as symptoms of spring and summer, whereas death and decay eat away at those dreams as symptoms of fall and winter.

It’s a familiar structure to Bergman’s 1940’s films (IT RAINS ON OUR LOVE and PORT OF CALL come to mind). It works really well, only here there’s a twist. Fall and winter lead to doubt and aperture, not sentiment and closure. All this postwar anxiety, escape, compromise, adulting (and refusing to do so) represents an interesting tonal shift from Bergman’s previous films, a transition from subversive melodrama to pedestrian horror. 

No better way to describe that ending than to see it as a frightening, ambivalent future where duty and ego forever conflict. 

Accept the status quo like Henry? 

Preserve the dream like Monika? 

I find myself in tension with both.

Bergman Ranked