Monika works in a vegetable market, and Harry lives next door. Monika gets Harry to take her to the movies, and soon they are going steady. After spending the night with Monika on his father's boat, Harry is fired. The two of them take off, leaving Stockholm and all cares behind.

At first, things are idyllic: sun bathing in the nude, drinking, going to dances. But Monika becomes pregnant. They run out of food and must steal it from summer cottages. Monika is caught and only barely gets away. Finally, they return. Harry's aunt gets them married.

A daughter is born, but Monika leaves caring for her to Harry. Harry goes on a business trip and returns a day early. He finds Monika in bed with another man. They separate. Harry is left with the daughter and memories of a summer with Monika, while Monika is headed for a life of prostitution.

"A tender yet unsentimental account of a love affair that turns sour. Harriet Andersson gives a precociously assured performance as a wild, feckless girl from Stockholm's poorer quarter who falls in love with a 19-year-old youth. During an idyllic motor-boat holiday among the islands of the Stockholm archipelago, the girl becomes pregnant and the couple, forced to marry, set up home in a tiny, cramped flat. Very soon, love gives way to distrust and hostility, and they agree to part. Bergman's sympathetic eye and Gunnar Fischer's atmospheric photography invest the locations with a poetic significance, the light and open spaces of the holiday islands contrasted tellingly with the dark claustrophobia of the city, where the flame of the couple's love is slowly extinguished by the lack of air."

"Ingmar Bergman's 1952 feature stars Harriet Andersson as a self-centered adolescent temptress who manages a brief romantic interlude with an errand boy (Lars Ekborg) before walking out in boredom, leaving him to care for their illegitimate child. This, the first Bergman feature to get worldwide art-house distribution, represented a new direction for Bergman in his detailed treatment of a youthful character. His first film with Andersson shows a developing ability to probe the psychology of a rich, vital woman without losing his objectivity. Minor but worth seeing."

"Summer With Monika, in fact, already is Et Dieu…créa la femme, but brought off brilliantly, without a single flaw, without a single hesitation, with total lucidity in both dramatic and moral construction and in its development, in other words its mise en scène....One must see Summer With Monika, if only for the extraordinary moment when Harriet Andersson, before making love with the man she has already thrown out once before, stares fixedly into the camera, her laughing eyes clouded with confusion, and calls on us to witness her disgust at involuntarily choosing hell instead of heaven. It is the saddest shot in the history of the cinema."

Jean-Luc Godard: "Summer with Monika"

Philip Strick: "Film Notes"