Summer Interlude

(1951) dir Ingmar Bergman w/Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellin [96 min; DCP]

Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career – isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past – Ingmar Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery. In one of the director’s great early female roles, Maj-Britt Nilsson beguiles as an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student (Malmsten). Her memories of the sunny, rocky shores of Stockholm’s outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her gloomy present, most of them set in the dark backstage environs of the theater where she works. A film that the director considered a creative turning point, SUMMER INTERLUDE is a reverie about life and death that unites Bergman’s love of theater and cinema. The Boston premiere of this film (under the title Illicit Interlude) at the Brattle in October of 1957 appears to be the second theatrical run of a Bergman film in the area (beat out by SAWDUST AND TINSEL in July of the same year at the long defunct Trans-Lux). The release immediately followed Janus Films and Brattle Theatre co-founder Cyrus J. Harvey Jr.’s trip to Sweden to seal a distribution deal for Bergman’s films after he caught a screening of SUMMER WITH MONIKA during a 1956 trip to Paris.