A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

It was inevitable that, in the process of his maturation as a writer and filmmaker, Woody Allen would progress beyond the flippant comedies of his early years and gradually work a more serious dimension into his art.  This middle phase of Allen's career brought us some of the director's best films - Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) - but there were also a fair number of failures and near-misses.  A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is one of the less worthy of Woody Allen's films in this inspired and varied period, a film that continues to divide opinion in spite of its obvious charms and the presence of Mia Farrow in the first of the 13 films she made with Allen.

Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was the chief inspiration for the film, although other influences are not too hard to detect, from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to Jean Renoir's Parte de campagne (1936) and La Règle du jeu (1939).  Allen tones down his brash comedy style so that his waspish wisecracking humour and comedic hijinks attain a homopathic level of dilution, and the result is a good-natured but mostly humourless chamberpiece that would more easily fit into Anton Chekhov's oeuvre than Woody Allen's.  Whether it's because of the stiff-shirt period setting or the Bergman association, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is among the tamest of Allen's sex comedies, one that you could safely show to your grandmother without blushing or furnishing her with a dictionary.

To be fair, there is the odd excursion into that familiar stratum of Allen lunacy that we have come to know and love, most involving Allen strapped to an implausible flying contraption that is bound to come crashing out of the sky at some point.  But for the most part, however, the film resembles an upmarket French rom-com of the 1980s, with six sexually frustrated characters spending far more time talking about their pent-up desires than actually acting upon them.  If Allen were French (the mind boggles at the thought), this is probably the kind of film he would have made all the time - so we should perhaps be grateful for small mercies.  What makes A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy tolerable, indeed enjoyable to a certain extent, is that it is a one-off, Allen's attempt to charter new territory as he set about taming his erstwhile penchant for ungainly silliness.

The film has a least two redeeming virtues - it is beautifully photographed and features a talented cast, with Allen for once happy to play as part of an ensemble rather than take the lead.  José Ferrer (best known for his stage and screen portrayals of Cyrano de Bergerac) gives most value as the pompous intellectual who (like Allen) appears to be an irresistible magnet for the finest examples of female pulchritude.  Ferrer may not get the best lines, but he makes the most of what he is given and outclasses both of his male co-stars, so that poor Tony Roberts comes across as a second rate Don Juan fighting a losing battle in the charisma stakes against a typically neurotic Allen.  The three female protagonists are pretty interchangeable, with little to distinguish them other than their coiffure.  Mia Farrow is the image of pre-Raphaelite loveliness and you half expect her to meet a tragic end in a stream, à la Millais's famous painting Ophelia.  In fact, she comes close to doing just that, thanks to one of Allen's less successful aeronautical ventures.  Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty might as well have been clones - one of the script's main failings is its inability to make either character believable or distinguishable.  It is to the film's detriment that the female characters all appear as little more than two-dimensional objects in a male wish fulfilment fantasy, whilst the male characters are overwhelming slaves to their over-developed libido - they might just as well have been portrayed as walking phalluses.

Glib lines such as "Marriage is the death of hope" and "Sex alleviates tension and love causes it" lack the punch and wisdom that leap from the page of any anthology of Woody Allen quotes, but the film's biggest let-down is the absence of a strong central idea to drive the slow and repetitive narrative.  Waffly allusions to the supernatural look like a half-hearted attempt to inject some poetic substance into the lacklustre storyline but these ultimately fall flat and rob the film of anything approaching a satisfying conclusion.  The gorgeous photography (with exterior shots clearly modelled on French impressionistic paintings of the 19th century) is a poor substitute for content but this at least helps to make up for the below-par script and chronic lack of decent gags, particularly when accompanied with the divine music of Felix Mendelssohn.  Compared with the great Bergman film that inspired it, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is pretty inconsequential, but, helped by its impressive production values and all-too infrequent lapses into side-splitting farce, it is far from being Allen's worst film.

Film Synopsis

New York, circa 1900.  On the eve of their wedding, esteemed philosopher Leopold and his bride-to-be Ariel accept an invitation to spend a weekend at the country home of Andrew, a Wall Street stockbroker and part-time inventor.  Andrew's conjugal relations with his wife Adrian are fraught at present and are not helped by the fact that Andrew and Ariel once shared a mutual attraction which they failed to act upon.  The party is joined by another couple - the over-sexed Dr Maxwell and his latest conquest, the sexually liberated nurse Dulcy.  It isn't long before Andrew and Maxwell are fighting over Ariel, whom they both desire with a passion bordering on the reckless. Meanwhile, keen to make the best use of his last hours of bachelorhood, Leopold makes his move on Dulcy...