"For me, Swedish summer is deeply lust-oriented," Ingmar Bergman admitted in an interview in 1968. That summerly lust is communicated in this film in a very direct manner. It centres on, to quote Bergman: "a boy and a girl that break free of their jobs and families, very, very young, and they leave for the archipelago and then they come back and try to settle down in a kind of middle-class way of life. And then the whole thing just goes horribly wrong." Bergman shot the frisky summer scenes, harmless by today's standards, with an old silent film camera on the island of Ornö. A "wild, orgiastic love scene" fell victim to the censors. Ingmar Bergman: "There has never been a girl in Swedish cinema with a less restrained erotic aura than Harriet Andersson." An opinion shared by François Truffaut, who had his adolescent alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud steal a lobby card of Harriet Andersson from a cinema display in "The 400 Blows" (1959).