Summer with Monika (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Summer with Monika (1953) is a Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman from a novel by Per Anders Fogelstrom.

Monika (Harriet Andersson), for a long time a believable character, and Harry (Lars Ekberg), not much explored, are two adolescent lovers.  Both are inexperienced and foolish but also harassed and even mistreated.  Eventually they marry, but in the film’s final third, unfortunately, Bergman allows Monika to become a surprising tramp.  This is, nonetheless, one of the Swede’s few successful movies, remarkably made with its wonderful exterior shots, long takes and (of course) mise en scene.

In addition, it is a famously erotic film—and not just for 1953—albeit Andersson has assets other than those under her blouse.  She is an actress so “natural” it is uncanny, as true in her hysteria as in everything else.  She creates a good blending of sophistication and innocence, and is enticingly kinetic.  It is a great performance in a more-than-okay movie.

(In Swedish with English subtitles)

The novel The Dark Angels (1936), by Francois Mauriac, presents us with the complicated Gradere, a man who allows himself to sink into utterly foul illegality.  A particular woman, Aline, is a threat to him because of Gradere’s dirty business practices, and an elderly man named Desbats uses her to deepen the threat.  Gradere determines to do something about it.

The novel’s prologue consists of a letter Gradere has written to the village priest, Alain, a good man.  The priest recoils passionately from some information in the letter:  Gradere was once told by another priest that “there are human souls that have been given to [the Devil].”  The reader is left to ask whether this is so.  Mauriac seems to see a half-truth in it, but also expresses, of course, his Christian optimism about God, He Who is “greater than the strength of our mad desire to achieve damnation.”  Withal, he brings Gradere to faith and repentance.

Frankly, this might be deemed implausible and even forced—it is not like the conclusion of, say, Read’s A Married Man—and yet it takes place at the same time that the priest is afflicted with a troubled, self-doubting mind.  This seems to make Gradere’s conversion artistically acceptable. . . The Dark Angels is a wise and poetically written book.  As for the title, well, if certain souls (or all souls?) are given to the Devil, maybe it is the “dark” angels, as it were, who effect it.

It looks like director Claude Barras was able to borrow a good story for his stop-motion animated film, My Life as a Zucchini (2017), based on a novel called Autobiography of a Zucchini.

Engaging and sad, it has to do with children in an orphanage, and their big-eyed, almost blasted faces bespeak uncommon hardship.  There is no despair here, though, and nothing cheap or uninspired about the exquisite visuals.  The movie is not really for kids, but they should probably see it anyway.  A dubbed version of this French-Swiss production offers the voices of Nick Offerman and Will Forte.

Jules and Jim (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the French film Jules and Jim (1961), from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, Jules, Jim and Catherine flow into play, ecstasy and romantic love and then into disappointment and the reality of Catherine being “a dark flame ready to burn herself or anyone else” (David Thomson).  Sorry, ladies.  This is another Francois Truffaut movie that features an emotionally disturbed woman.  It is also one to which he brings his usual love of life and . . . what?

A caveat:  I get tired of Jules and Jim because of all the talk and all the episodes.  It is not one of my favorite Truffaut films.  It is assuredly inferior to Two English Girls and The 400 Blows.  Still, it can be delightfully vigorous and intelligent.  It makes us glad that Truffaut had a personal style.  And it has Jeanne Moreau.

(In French with English subtitles)

Today’s Hollywood trudges on.  Multiethnic madness—and villainy—prevail in Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver (2017), with its speedily moving wild bunch.

Jon Hamm is even better here, playing a married crook turned killer, than he was in Mad Men.  Hamm is Buddy, who’s fairly likable until his wife Darlin’ (Eliza Gonzalez), another crook, gets shot up by the police about as intensely as Bonnie Parker does in Bonnie and Clyde.  Now Buddy is out for blood—the blood of the dude he blames for his wife’s death:  the getaway driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort), who seldom talks and incessantly listens (to rock music).  In fact he drives, walks and runs to the inescapable music, and even the shoot-out in which Darlin’ loses her life is a dance routine with firearms.

Edgar Wright is a British director whose technique in Baby Driver is cartoonish but soberingly fun and mostly clever.  His compatriot, Lily James, is very pretty and quite pleasing, affecting an American accent, as Baby’s girlfriend.  A lot of things go on in this flick, and I was never bored with any of it.  It’s utterly propulsive but not punishing (I think)—except to the crooks.