Unfamiliar pleasures Early Ingmar Bergman at the HFA BY STEVE VINEBERG
	"Ingmar Bergman: Early Works" At the Harvard Film Archive December 3 through 14

The Ingmar Bergman films that the Harvard Film Archive will be screening this month aren’t the familiar ones — the metaphysical explorations like The Seventh Seal, the chamber dramas like Through a Glass Darkly and Persona that he filmed on his island off the Swedish coast, the late dissections of marriage and family like Scenes from a Marriage. These are the very early Bergmans, released between 1946 and 1954. They include some movies no Bergman festival I can remember has ever shown — Prison a/k/a The Devil’s Wanton (December 3 at 9 p.m.) and Frenzy a/k/a Torment (which he wrote and Alf Sjöberg directed; December 3 at 7 p.m.) — as well as the rather banal sex farces Secrets of Women a/k/a Waiting Women (December 7 at 9:15 p.m.) and A Lesson in Love (December 14 at 9:15 p.m.), which he used as testing grounds for his great 1955 high comedy Smiles of the Summer Night.

Here’s the 1953 The Naked Night a/k/a Sawdust and Tinsel (December 8 at 9:15 p.m.), perhaps the first movie that feels unmistakably like a Bergman drama, dappled with expressionistic sequences and heavy on symbolism. It’s not a very satisfying picture, though it has a bravura opening, where circus caravans wend their slow way up a hill and past a lake that reflects them back, and it’s fascinating to see how much the film influenced Fellini, who brought out La strada the following year. And here’s Thirst (December 4 at 9:15 p.m.), from 1949, sometimes called Three Strange Loves, an oddball mélange of linked love stories. The talented Eva Henning plays a moody dancer whose first romance breaks up when she gets pregnant and has an abortion that leaves her sterile, and whose marriage, to a professor, stalls. Birgit Tengroth is her husband’s old lover, now a widow doomed to unhappiness. And Mimmi Nelson is a former classmate of the dancer’s who has always been in love with her. The stories overlap, and it takes a while to get the relationships down. The movie is best in the scenes between Henning and Birger Malmsten, who enact one of Bergman’s earliest portraits of a miserable, Strindbergian marriage.

Thirst is the most unusual entry in the series, but the best (of the ones I’ve seen) are the 1950 Summer Interlude a/k/a Illicit Interlude (December 5 at 7 p.m.), the 1953 The Summer with Monika a/k/a Monika (December 5 at p.m. and December 15 at 9:15 p.m.), and the 1948 Port of Call (December 4 at 7 p.m.). You can feel the influence of Strindberg on Port of Call, too, though it also recalls Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie — the seaside setting, the heroine who can’t bury her sexual past. Nine-Christine Jonsson’s Berit falls for Bengt Eklund’s Gösta, the affable, uncomplicated sailor who rescues her when she throws herself into the water. In a beautifully underplayed scene, she takes him home and allows him to make love to her — but regretfully, as if she knew that this one-night stand is all she can expect. Next morning, she refuses his farewell embrace, but then she asks him whether he’ll be back, and after he departs, putting on her lipstick, she draws a face on the mirror and swirls the word "lonesome" above it like smoke drifting out of a pipe.

Port of Call is a rather theatrical, though naturalistic, melodrama that demonstrates Bergman’s stage training — it’s superbly modulated (at least until the phony, Steinbeckian we’re-the-people finale), with scenes that stick with you. One is an argument between Berit and her mother (Berta Hall), whose marriage — to a sailor — was so bitter and claustrophobic that Berit has grown up without much faith in the union of men and women. This squabble between the sad but fully eroticized young woman and her tired, repressed mother is practically an archetypal sequence: you can hear not only the great Scandinavian modernist playwrights, Ibsen and Strindberg, in it but their counterparts from other European theaters as well, like the Frank Wedekind of Spring Awakening. Berit’s past involves a wretched existence eked out in a reformatory after she ran away with her boyfriend to escape the sordid, prison-like atmosphere of her parents’ cottage. Bergman works up a dramatic intensity from the opening, crisis-point scene, Berit’s suicide attempt, and he and his photographer, Gunnar Fischer, establish a fatalistic lyricism with magnificent moonlit late-night and foggy early-morning shots of the port.

Both Summer Interlude and The Summer with Monika are heartbreakers — though Interlude at least provides a happy ending. Like Port of Call, they’re realist depictions of young love. Harriet Andersson, Bergman’s first great leading lady, plays the title character in Monika, a teenager who combines a scruffy working-class sensuality with a slightly preposterous romanticism derived from Hollywood movies. She’s a raunchier version of the prostitute in Gorky’s The Lower Depths who fancies herself living the life of the women in the books she pores over. Monika sees her beau, Harry (Lars Ekborg), as "a guy out of a movie," but he’s just an ordinary fellow. It’s she who makes the first move, in his parents’ home, though their lovemaking has to be put off when his dad comes home early. There’s a marvelous scene where she strips to go skinny-dipping in the sea and, awestruck, he touches her breasts; their youth touches you in ways you don’t expect. What brings these two together is a natural rebellion against the oppressive workaday world, but they can’t get away from it — they marry and have a child and get swallowed up by it all over again. Ekborg has an affecting moment when Harry looks at his baby daughter for the first time and realizes in a terrified flash what he’s in for.

With her thick, expressive lower lip and her slightly chunky seductiveness, Andersson is an unusual choice for a movie heroine — from some angles she looks a little like Patty Duke — and she doesn’t strike a false note. (She rarely does, over a long career.) Monika is essentially selfish: she doesn’t want to take care of a child, she’d rather have a new coat than bother with the rent, and, inevitably, she cheats on Harry. But Andersson and Bergman make her sympathetic nonetheless. When she cries about how her life has turned out — they never have enough cash, she’s afraid that poverty and motherhood have turned her ugly — you understand her plight, how life has caught and pinned her. But our final tears are for Harry, whom Monika leaves, again predictably, to raise the child on his own. We see him for the last time in a grown-up overcoat and a grown-up hat, this teenage boy from the early scenes, now aging fast, and his eyes widen as he remembers their brief summer idyll, such a short while ago.

This is where Monika intersects with Summer Interlude, which is one of my three or four favorite Bergmans. Maj-Britt Nilsson’s Marie is a gifted ballerina whose first love affair, with Henrik (Birger Malmsten), ends tragically when at the end of their single summer together he dies in a diving accident. (The Australian director Sue Brooks quoted this scene in one of last year’s best — and least seen — films, Japanese Story.) Interlude intercuts the flashback story of their romance with Marie’s present-day life: after he died, she buried the feelings he stirred in her, first in a loveless liaison with an older man who once adored her mother, and now in her career, which she’s allowed to blot out everything else in her life. The movie’s trajectory is Marie’s release of her long tamped-down emotions, which she can accomplish only by reliving her summer interlude with Henrik. Interlude is about the passing of time, and Nilsson’s remarkable performance, contrasting the young, carefree Marie in the first bloom of love with the rueful, taut, reined-in prima ballerina, supremely poised, sets off this theme.

Afterward, you remember the summer scenes best. When Marie and Henrik are off on their own, he tells her he feels "as though we were inside a soap bubble. It’s so beautiful, I wish I’d burst into fragments and vanish into nothing." She hints around, charmingly, that it’s time he kissed her, and they describe their physical sensations as they stand near each other. And then, wondrously, a peacock saunters by. The image of this exotic creature is Bergman’s way of suggesting the strange new realm the lovers have entered. The whole world seems to be in blossom. "I’ll never die," she promises him, but then the cry of an owl freaks her out and she asks him to hold her as tight as she can, as if she were afraid she’ll fall away from him, off the edge of the world. She doesn’t realize that he’s the one who’ll fall. Although it came out a mere five years after he’d started making movies, Summer Interlude is almost as good as Bergman ever got.