Smiles of a Summer Night

One of the director's few comedies and perhaps his best. Here we meet several of the themes which have become synonymous to Bergman's better known films. Bergman displays impassively his breadth of talent combining quite impressively comical situations with intensely tragic ones.

The film deals with the liaisons between several couples as they move in different and rather unpredictable stages during their erotic games. The setting is a country house party in the midsummer of 1900 and if it already sounds familiar it's because the whole thing was reinterpreted rather dully, in Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

Bergman examines pitilessly - in what could have been a Buñuelian treatment - the characters of the story irrespective of whether they're men or women. In fact, as in almost every Bergman film, it is women who are the dominant figures while men are usually reduced to empty receptacles filled in by womens wishes. Characteristically, one has to mention one of the final scenes of the film where the myth of the male honour is placed under scrutiny, where the two male characters are "playing" a game of Russian roulette in their effort to conquer a woman. Bergman ridicules very intelligently such bourgeois constructs and the result is often hilarious, often forceful in the way tension is built up. He extracts terrific performances from his cast but one has to applaud especially Eva Dahlbeck in her portrayal of the wise, manipulative mistress, Harriet Andersson as the flirtatious maid and Gunnar Bjornstrand as the helpless and pathetic man thrown in disturbingly funny and desperate situations. A brifliant film which gives Bergman a face few are accustomed to.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993=94