"Ingmar Bergman's method of making film is miraculous....He belongs to a handful here and there in the world who are now discovering the future articulation of film, and the result can be revolutionary."


"Told in flashback as the memories of a ballerina approaching the end of her career, this sensitively observed story traces a teenage love affair which took place one idyllic summer on the archipelago near Stockholm. Bergman's preoccupation with the transition from youthful innocence to adult experience is already clearly marked here, as is the double movement of a journey backward into one's own past which nevertheless marks a spiritual progression. For it is through her re-living of her past that the heroine comes to embrace the tentative possibilities for her future. The translation of the title, incidentally, is incorrect and misleading. Sommarlek means Summer Games, and Bergman's concern is with the transience of playful youth."


"Ingmar Bergman considers this 1951 production to be his first truly personal film, though it's hardly original—its lyricism owes a great deal to the French romantic dramas of the period. But the sense of fate that descends over the drama is very much Bergman's own—cruel, distant, ultimately imponderable."