Summer With Monika

a.k.a. Monika: The Story of a Bad Girl. This early Ingmar Bergman film shows workings of a master before he developed his style. Tells the story of young lovers who run away and spend the summer together on a boat and later get married. The character of Monika is the kind of ambivalent, amusing youth that Godard and Truffaut would make famous a few years later with the boom of the French New Wave. This lacks the spiritual angst and also the profundity of his finest works. This may also be his most sexual film, despite its mid-1950's release. Features some of his other themes of female sexuality, complications of relationships, and male-female communication.