Smiles of a Summer Night (1957)

SOMETHING YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN

In the Scandanavian countries, Midsummer Night, when the sun does not set for days, and the world seems lit by a osy or golden glow, is a time of revelry and sexual abandon. There's a great Stindberg play, MISS JULIE that takes place on a Midsummer night. A fine movie of the play was made in the 50s, and is well worth seeing. This original story was filmed roughly at the same time as MISS JULIE, and is written to take place at roughly the same time; that is, the 1880s - 90s, at end of the 19th century. This film is called one of Bergman's few Romantic Comedies. It is, if you consider that it takes place a a time when romance as we know it at the beginning of the 21st Century, was unknown. Marriages were generally or at least often, maters of financial arrangement between families. Romance, then, consisted of flights of erotic fancy between ponderous volumes of sexual domesticity; or, to put it more frankly, Romance had more to do with the excitement of adultery than anything else, and was a form of enertainment given to upper-middle class people and to aristocrats. The European way.

At a time when the world's management definitely belonged solely o ostensibly intelligent men, such men were expected to be deftly manipulated by clever women. And this film is a celebratin of that fact.

All the actors are good, and some exceptionally so. The scenario was brilliantly written and filled with a superabundance of sometimes exquisite, but often brual irony. The direction is beyond criticism, like the cinematography, the sets and the lighting. SMILES was filmed in silvery, expressive black and white. There are stylisic elements of Jean Renoir and Josef von Sternberg films, but they are unobtrusive.

Woody Allen is supposed to have said after first viewing of this film, "It was the most fun I've ever had without sex." Understandable.

This movie ought to be reserved for viewing by mature people; by those who have been around the block a few times and/or undergone at least one marriage. I mean people who know what it means to be tempted to cheat, whether or not they ever submitted to that temptation, for they would best appreciate both the comic and the dramatic nature of the situations. Experienced men and women are best equipped to appreciate this gladiator's struggle against convention.

Does it strike you too as ironic that at a time when the news is occupied with disputes about the legitimacy or lack thereof, in Gay marriage, that a raffish celebrity is quoted as having said: "If they want it, why shouldn't they be allowed to share in our misery?" Should the sanctity of adultery be kept for sexually orthodox heterosexuals? Ah, things you can't explain, really. December 19, 2008

A sad farce

An immoral, sexually obsessed troupe: some kind of religious sect of wackos á la Sweden try to find love and live-fulfillment but they look for it in sex -changing and exchanging sex partners in order to find the combination that does the trick, and alas! it fails. A parody of the absurd "make love, not war" 60's-old sentiment.

It could well be read as I did above, however, here's another alternative.

Fathre/son dialogue (The libertine father and the soon to be cleryman son): "Man loves himself, his self-love, and his love of love itself." (Father dixit). On sex: "-Fortunately, women don't take it half as seriously as we do. Otherwise the human race would die out." (At the rate they are aborting today, for sure). -You joke about everything. -You will too when you see your own foolishness.

Father and son represent opposite world/life views. Clearly Bergman prefers the father figure over the old morals, customs and must-nots of the clery and religious minded, who are depicted as ignorant, frustrated, angry and pitiful creatures.

But then the libertine father meets his "artistic" lover. He asks her to please tell him that his 18 year-old wive Anne is either a "hopeless case or the opposite", meaning is she ever going to grow up and love him as a man-husband, instead of the father figure she sees in him, a man who rescued her from her innocent family life. The lover wants to know what he'll give her for the info. He offers hre his religious minded son as a sexual pet. She says no. Then pearls are offered, but she has enough. Whith a smile he says she'll be rewarded in heaven. And this time she reacts in anger (like he'd just mentioned a taboo word): "-I want my reward in this life!" What rings the bell to me is the violent reaction, which obviosly means something strongly for Bergman.

Why would she react like that? Because she knows there's no heaven for her? or because, literally, she wants her reward now? I'd say the fact of his mentioning heaven must have played some part in the violence of her reaction (as compared to the other 2 offers), or otherwise she would have simply rejected it likewise.

So there are very strong feelings held on religious issues as heaven. We see this "comic" confrontation of points of view on these issues and characters vrey clearly. And "comic" isn't the most appropriate word to define this film, a sad satire rather. In fact tears and sadness are all about the place.

The 4 main characters are very different. The young wive is a pure heart, sexually and mentally still a child, opposite of her husband's lover, an adult woman expert in knowing what she wants and how to barter to get it. Of course Anne, the wive, so young as she is doesn't even know she "should" want the same things the lover does. Alas, innocence. And Bergman assumes that in time she will come to want them indeed, but the husband wants her to find out by herself.

The points of view on these issues: sex, moral values, religion, are the core of the story. It's the two libertine characters who do the judging of the other two sexually deprived ones. When I say judging I mean they consider themselves the wiser ones, they know things the other two don't. The son and the wive, poor things, they don't any better, it seems to say. Is Bergman Freudian? It's pretty clear that the film depicts people who have scruples about sexual relations as considered either social inferiors, or physically undeveloped, or plain fundamentalist wackos. Immoral people seem to be the rightish kind of people for the modern world. Getting to see things as Bergman sees them is a game of engineering perversion played on the mind, devilish and with the European touch of distinction.

Wait, there's more. Bergman isn't just ridiculing Christian moral values, that would be preaching against preaching. He tosses in the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie as well. Funny how the aristocracy seems to get scot free always in this socialist films when they live as magnificently as the rich depicted here. Hypocrisy we have, yes: "-You are not ifit to have a child" says the libertine husband to his lover. And she slaps him indignantly, of course, since she also has her pride. So we find out that the unfaithful husband is not the heroe of the story. Of the two, the real dignified character seems to be the "artistic" go-getter lover. She is not a hypocrite about her profession, so that makes her a dignified prostitute.

I personally prefer Buñuel's films to Bergman's. Buñuel is a brute, an insulting, unsentimental, finger-in-the-eye sort of fellow. He'll make fun of what he despises (the hypocrisy of Catholics) so blatantly that you got to laugh with him. But Bergman is another class. More subtle. He takes the upper hand like the self-righteous leftist media does by showing first the starving black children of Africa, and then rich Wall Street brokers.

But going back to the lover, and as a way to finish, does she really do well? After all she is the loneliest character. And everyone can see she really wants to be in the young wive's shoes. Does Bergman want to make fools of ALL his chatacters? and go out scots free? Impossible. In that case he would make a fool of himself. September 20, 2008

Good early Bergman

Ingmar Bergman's 1955 comedy Smiles Of A Summer Night (Sommarnattens Leende) was the film that first garnered him international recognition. It would be a couple of years before The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries cemented his reputation as an international film auteur, but looking back on this film, over a half a century later, and half a world away, it only shows how differently tastes in humor can be. Compared to today's better film comedies, this film is both more mature and more puerile in its approach to sex, in that it treats its characters as intellectual beings, yet also shows them as somehow reserved. Granted, the film is set in turn of the 20th Century Sweden, yet there is still an element missing in the film, especially when compared to later films in the Bergman canon. That missing element would most likely be depth.
Yes, compared to even more `intellectual' Hollywood comedies of recent vintage, like Sideways, Smiles Of A Summer Night is far deeper, but there is truth to the old Woody Allen claim that drama is `sitting at the grown ups table'. In fact, Allen was so smitten with this film that he tried to do his own version of it a quarter century later, in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Of course, his own film was one of Allen's lesser works. Yet, so too is this film one of Bergman's lesser works. Stephen Sondheim also based his musical, A Little Night Music, on this film. The camera work, by Bergman's first collaborating cinematographer, Gunnar Fischer, is stellar, especially in the interior scenes, where the whites radiate like novae in comparison to the pitch hues, but the film is at its weakest in the characterizations. No, unlike most modern fiction in film or prose, it is not a failure for its reliance on the trite, but for its simple lack of detail. The viewer is never drawn into the characterizations nor dilemmas of the main protagonists. This is certainly a flaw that dogs most comedies. Even the comedies of William Shakespeare are notably deficient in this area- most especially his appropriately wretched A Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet, even though this is the only real failure of the film, it is enough to make this a rather tepid viewing experience, especially for the refined Bergmaniac.
September 18, 2008

Tears behind smiles

"Smiles of a Summer Night" was Bergman's last chance. He'd been making films for a decade, and none of them had been a commercial success. His backers were fed up. Unexpectedly, though, "Smiles" was both a box office and critical hit, and immediately afterwards Bergman got the go-ahead to make "The Seventh Seal." The rest is history.

"Smiles" is a very good film, although it has its flaws. It's a bit too long, for example. The first half could've been edited more closely. The musical score, moreover, is syrupy, as only 1950s cinematic scores can be.

On the other hand, the script is good, alternating between genuinely funny lines and darker, more ambivalent ones. The characters and situation are comic at one level, but this is definitely not your typical bedroom farce. Throughout the film run themes of loneliness and unfulfilled yearning to love and be loved, fear of aging and losing one's sexual attractiveness, the tension between our interiors and the public masks we don, and the transience of affection--staples of Bergman's films. As one of the characters says, "most of us have neither the gift nor the punishment of love"; another laments that "one can't protect another from any kind of suffering. That's what makes one so weary." And in the monologue about the three smiles of a summer night, the first smile, enjoyed by those who love innocently, is acknowledged to be rare and fleeting.

The acting is superb, with laurels going to Harriet Andersson's Petra, the frankly sensual serving maid to Fredrek Egerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand), and Eva Dahlbeck's Desiree Armfeldt, the worldly actress who engineers the summer weekend of the film's second half. Jarl Kulle's foppish but dangerous Count Carl Magnus Malcolm is also memorable. Ake Fridell as Frid, the life-celebrating coachman who woos Petra, is excellent. Although his role is small, it's pivotal. Bergman gives him the final say, literally and figuratively.

The Criterion edition includes a fascinating dialogue between the film scholar Peter Cowie and Joern Donner, Swedish actor and producer, as well as a short introduction by Bergman himself in which he reveals that he learned that "Smiles" had been recognized at Cannes while reading a newspaper in the john. August 10, 2008

INGMAR BERGMAN, OPUS 16

***** 1955. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. A prize (Best Poetic Humor!) at Cannes and the Bergman phenomenon started at that moment. This film is a romantic comedy opposing women and men or rather life and death. In SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, men are clearly related to death, just observe the lawyer Egerman playing Russian roulette or his son Henrik trying to commit suicide. Women, on the contrary, are described as solar, filled with life, by the Swedish master. Yes! Such serious and dark themes can be found in this pseudo light comedy which is already in your library if you like cinema. For those of you more attracted by the lighter side of this film, I would advise them to stick to Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, a smart remake of the Bergman's masterpiece that holds only its light side without proposing any special food for the mind. May 1, 2008

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