Breaking Up

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SUMMER PARADISE

Directed by Gunnel Lindblom Written by Ulla Isaksson and Gunnel Lindblom

As they have for decades, four generations of family gather for their annual holiday in the comfortable old summer house on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. The patriarch sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night convinced he's dying; the rest of the time he's a hearty reactionary. His daughter Katha (played with a kind of wary warmth by Birgitta Valberg) is a doctor resisting the steadily accumulating evidence that the safe, predictable middle-class world is dying. She hopes wanly that the reassertion of family traditions will combine with her own insistently retained routines to stave off the anarchical forces that she sees.

Her friend Emma, a social worker and one of several outsiders visiting the summer paradise, falls periodically into despair over the rootlessness and lovelessness of children she sees professionally, who are the first victims of the decline of old values. Sif Ruud gives a fine portrayal of a manic depressive in this role, and functions as a kind of chorus commenting on the mounting evidence that she is right. One of Katha's daughters awaits the return of a philandering husband, not at all certain he will come back to her or that it will be good if he does. Another daughter has brought along a man she has picked up. Though the growth of genuine love between them is one of the pleasant parts of this movie, the woman has other problems--a daughter of her own who is a latchkey child and a close woman friend: a despondent revolutionary with a near-psychotic child who is the noisiest serpent in this garden.

In the end it is not this lad, but someone we have scarcely noticed--Katha's silent and solitary nephew--who brings the summer to an end in tragedy. He makes us feel, like the characters, that we should have paid attention to him, should have been less caught up in the more colorful melodramas going on around him and in the abstractions they have given rise to.

This description of the film's story plays it false, makes it seem somehow a schematic representation of a textbook family, when in fact the people of Paradise are carefully particularized. The film is the first time that Gunnel Lindblom, an actress in several Ingmar Bergman movies, has directed (Bergman has the producer's credit). Her touch is usually delicate. Even the unhappy ending is understated, though there is a hint of further tragedy to come. There will be more to this family's life, and not all, of it a misery, before we write finis either to it or to the institution in general. All one can say is that the warning signs of decay have been laid out soberly and provokingly in an artful film .

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