Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Film Review

Here's a thing - an Ingmar Bergman film that is guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.  Friends and associates of the great Swedish director have often commented on his scurrilous sense of humour, but there's precious little sign of this in his films, most of which are bleak explorations of the human psyche combined with sombre metaphysical themes.   Smiles of a Summer Night is the one film that stands apart from all the rest and is almost the perfect antithesis of what most people understand by a Bergman film.  It's a frothy, light-hearted and thoroughly entertaining sex comedy, a bubbly mélange of Lubitsch and Renoir - a film that has a reputation as the best French farce ever made outside France.

Bizarrely, the screenplay for Bergman's lightest film was written at a time when the director came within an inch of committing suicide.  The film that emerged from this intense personal crisis - a clever reworking of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream - was to be his first major international success and earned him several prestigious awards, including a prize at Cannes (for Best Poetic Humour).   It was the first in a series of major works that were critically acclaimed across the globe, including The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries (1957).  The film inspired Stephen Sondheim's musical A Little Night Music and Woody Allen's A Midsummers Night Sex Comedy .

Whilst Smiles of a Summer Night is first and foremost a comedy, it still allows Bergman to explore the relationship between men and women, their problems and neuroses, with a profound insight and intelligence.  Beneath the obvious surface parody in which romantic love is portrayed as a kind of warfare, we can see the struggles and anxieties that wrack the human spirit, the conflict between desire, self-gratification and the nobler sentiments of decency and self-respect.

Bergman has a tendency to favour women in his work, and nowhere is this more apparent than in this film.  His treatment of his male characters is particularly cruel - they are portrayed as buffoons, bullies, lechers and rather silly children.  The women, by contrast, are shown to be the dominant sex, using the male libido as a tool to get precisely what they want.  They are strong-willed, scheming and seductive, yet they are shown in a far more sympathetic light than the men, who seem to have no real control over what happens to them.  For a man, life is just a series of games of Russian roulette, a meaningless sequence of random events which may bring success, disaster or humiliation according to the whim of Fate.  For a woman, life is a game of chess, a carefully calculated coherent narrative with a clear objective.  It may be a simplistic caricature, but Bergman is pretty well spot on in his observance of human failings.  Many of the things which provoke so much hilarity in this film will be revisted by the director in his later films, but with a much more tragic dimension.

Film Synopsis

Fredrik Egerman, a successful lawyer, has married Anne, a woman much younger than himself, and has yet to consummate the marriage.  Unbeknown to Fredrik, his son by an earlier marriage, Henrik, is madly in love with both Anne and the household maid Petra,  which is hard because he's destined for the priesthood.   A visit to the theatre allows Fredrik to renew his acquaintance with a former lover, the actress Desirée Armfeldt; he is shocked to discover that she has borne him a son.   Desirée is still mad about Fredrik, but realises that her current lover, a belligerent military man named Count Carl Magnus Malcolm, will not tolerate a rival, even though he himself is married, to the jealous Countess Charlotte.   Desirée is determined to win back Fredrik and so invites all the players in this complicated love mesh to her country house.  With the complicity of Countess Charlotte, the actress hatches a scheme that cannot possibly fail to save the former's marriage and restore to the latter her only true love...