Stills from "Bad Girl Monica"
In Trevor's 1959 film "Four Hundred Blows," two truant teenagers stole a poster of a beautiful girl in front of a movie theater, which was the savagely grown Monica in Bergman's film "Bad Girl Monica". That year, Truffaut, who would become the representative of French New Wave cinema, paid tribute to his youthful dedication without sorrow, leaving an eternal tribute to the film's predecessor Bergman. Two world-class film masters have thus completed a spiritual note in the world of light and shadow.
At the 8th Beijing International Film Festival in 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Bergman's birth, the film festival launched the "Centennial Birth Bergman" unit at the right time, and Bergman's fourteen classic works were able to launch a love affair through time with Chinese film fans. These fourteen works span the fifties and eighties of Bergman's creative career in the last century, and each film is a treasure trove of Bergman's history of world cinema, including monica, the bad girl created in 1953.
I prefer its other translation, "Summer with Monica," to the current convention, "Summer with Monica," which doesn't have the charm and impact of the former, but is more relevant to the story itself. The translation of "Monica bad girl" focuses on Monica and seems to make moral judgments, while "Summer with Monica" is a parallel story, in addition to Monica, there is obviously a person who introduces the perspective, this person is the male protagonist Harry.
"Bad Girl Monica" tells the story of a pair of young lovers who ran away from home and eloped to the end of the world in a dinghy. Let go of all the shackles and confinements, and have an unscrupulous rafting trip with your lover, which is a fairy tale that many young girls dare not expect. Despite the hunger and pregnancy at the end of the journey, the summer spent with Monica must have been the happiest time of Harry's life. At that time, Monica was 17 years old, and her vitality and wild light almost covered everything up, so that a generation of fans fell under Monica's pomegranate skirt, forgetting to bear the sorrow behind the happiness, which ordinary boy named Harry.
Bergman is probably the first filmmaker to explore the relationship between man and society through film, and the second half of the film is actually not without moral scrutiny. Monica's indifference to her daughter, her dissatisfaction with the poor life after marriage, her willfulness and infidelity, her departure and settlement, are not without the meaning of contemporary Pan Jinlian. However, Bergman did not simply act as a moral judge, but put the color palette of the characters in the context of society and family, allowing young life to release itself wantonly, and then in a flash of time, had to fall under the southern wall of social reality. In the end, Bergman tells a dark fairy tale with great meaning, he examines morality but does not judge morality, he laments the sorrow of life, and he envisions the beauty of life.
Poster of "Bad Girl Monica"
"Bad Girl Monica" is the earliest of the fourteen Bergman classics, but it is not Bergman's early works. In 1953, Bergman had already made "Women's Expectations", which showed a sharp stream of consciousness, as well as the classic love story "Summer Interlude", "Bad Girl Monica" was his twelfth work and the ninth year of his creative career. This time, Bergman pushes the film's digging and scheduling of actors to a new level, of course, this is also due to the spirituality of Harriet Anderson, who plays Monica. Outside of the film, Harriet takes away almost all the light of Monica's character, but easily leaves the "bad" of the character to the era behind Monica.
Monica's character is not unrelated to Harriet's dopamine effect on Bergman. Just as Harry and Monica's reckless elopement journey is filled with the beauty of love and hormones, and then crashes into the youth universe including Truffaut like a nuclear particle reaction, the film also inspires the new universe of the two creators. "Bad Girl Monica" not only opened the prelude to the love between Bergman and Harriet, but also opened the prelude to the cooperation between the two, "Joker Night", "Love Lesson", "Smile on summer nights", "Still in the Mirror", "Calling and Whispering" and a large number of masterpieces have come out, of which "Still in the Mirror" and "Calling and Whispering" won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Bergman is one of the few top masters in film history who has swept all the A-movie awards, and although this "Bad Girl Monica" did not bring him many trophies, it still played a pivotal role in the history of world cinema. The film's stimulation of life, especially the individual of youth life, is enough to keep him in the annals of the history of youth films in the world, and its exploration of the relevance of characters and society has also become the paradigm of later generations. If Bergman is just a judge of dual morality, triggering not exploration but the joy of reunion, then he will definitely not become a master, and the plot of stealing posters in Truffaut's debut "Four Hundred Blows" may also become a ruined poster.
The reason why Truffaut and Bergman had an over-the-air dialogue in his work, I think in addition to the throbbing of youth left by Monica to the teenagers, at the same time, there is no common frequency of pity for the same disease. In Truffaut's semi-autobiographical "Four Hundred Blows", the teenager Anton can never escape the real dilemma, but his biggest resistance can only be skipping class and not going home, to a Monica-style escape, which is the fire in the teenager's heart. Fortunately, Truffaut's life was not lost, and under the neglect of Bazin, the father of the French New Wave, the "bad boy Anton" finally grew into a representative figure of French New Wave films and became one of the masters of world film history.
Don't underestimate the plot of this humble poster stealing in "Four Hundred Strikes", which is clearly the inspiration of one master to another master. A good movie should be like this, burying seeds in the ground, wildfires burning endlessly, and spring winds blowing again.
Screenshot of "Four Hundred Strikes"