Ingmar Bergman's death earlier this week inspired numerous chuckleheaded reassessments, with many cultural critics suggesting that the great man's legacy had suffered the same harsh, lonely fate as did his God. Stefan Krohmer's acute, incisive chamber-drama Summer '04, however, with its isolated setting, its chilly family dynamic and its blunt recriminations, confirms Bergman's enduring influence — in Europe, at least, if not in America.
Granted, the basic scenario initially smacks more of Rohmer. (Hang on, Eric!) Wealthy enough to own a summer cottage at the seashore, middle-aged German couple André (Peter Davor) and Mirjam (Martina Gedeck, The Lives of Others) are also permissive enough to allow their teenage son, Nils (Lucas Kotaranin) to bring along his twelve-year-old girlfriend, Livia (Svea Lohde). What's more, they're strenuously non-judgmental enough to stay silent when Livia promptly dumps their moody, passive son and starts gallivanting about with a much older man, Bill (Robert Seeliger), German-born but lately arrived from America.
Eventually, Mirjam's maternal instinct kicks in; trouble is, so does her long-dormant sex drive, which takes her confrontation with Bill into areas certain to cause acute discomfort for all concerned. (MILF aficionados won't want to miss Gedeck's supremely sensual work here, which puts most of Hollywood's aspiring sex kittens to shame.)
In some respects, Summer '04 plays like a languid, sophisticated, Continental version of the underappreciated indie thriller Joshua, with well-meaning but ineffectual parents deftly manipulated by a scheming, precocious child. (I won't reveal which one.) Within a naturalistic context, though, the Machiavellian nonsense becomes a lot more problematic. While Krohmer's forbiddingly precise direction and the cast's nastily impassioned performances recall Bergman at his finest, Daniel Nocke's script, a literate wonder for most of the film's running time, concludes with a staggeringly misguided epilogue that effectively flushes ninety minutes' worth of painstaking behavioral nuance right down the toilet.
It's a heartbreaking act of self-sabotage that almost ruins — but doesn't quite — this otherwise superlative picture. — Mike D'Angelo
