I’m a big Ingmar Bergman fan and for that reason alone I enjoyed Smiles of a Summer Night. With some directors you just feel a connection, you get their jokes, you share similar wonders and question the same things. I love his approach to religion and questions of mortality. However, this film doesn’t really deal with much of that at all, which is probably the reason I merely liked it and wouldn’t necessarily suggest it as a must buy. Though, for Bergman fans, it’s certainly one to add to your collection.
While described as “one of cinema’s great erotic comedies” by Criterion, that’s a bit misleading, especially for today’s audiences. Perhaps it would be more properly worded as “quietly” erotic and “subtly” funny. You won’t be laughing out loud, at least not very often, and while Harriet Andersson (Through a Glass Darkly), Eva Dahlbeck and even the pregnant (but hiding it) Ulla Jacobsson are all incredibly attractive, there isn’t necessarily much about this film I’d call “erotic.” Maybe I’m being a stickler, but I’d rather call it a classic neurotic, LQTM movie… unfortunately that doesn’t move units. Too bad.
In one of the included essays, John Simon gives us a good introduction to the situation that led to this film’s creation:
What do you do when you are thoroughly miserable? A serious love affair is over, and a marriage to a wonderful woman is ending. Two of your films have bombed at the box office, and the head of your production company says he will ax you if you make another unmarketable drama. Your finances are extremely meager, but your body is even thinner, down to a measly 125 pounds. You have constant stomach pains and think you are dying of cancer (though later a specialist will determine that it is all psychosomatic). And you have a group of players who have been acting together for years and need a summer project. If you are Ingmar Bergman, you write a comedy.
This comedy, as Simon refers to it, centers on a group of four women and three men (four if you count Ake Fridell’s late introduction and you probably should considering he’s featured on the Blu-ray cover art alongside Andersson and gives added reason to the film’s title). These eight people are navigating life and love, looking for someone to love and love them back, but it gets a bit prickly along the way. Bjorn Bjelfvenstam, playing Henrik, the sexually confused son who’s attracted to his step-mother (Jacobsson) but is constantly flirted with by the family maid (Andersson), puts it best when he says, “Enemies, offensives, strategies, mines! Are you discussing love or warfare?”
Other characters include Henrik’s father, Fredrik Egerman (Bergman regular Gunnar Bjornstrand) who’s cheating on his wife with a previous flame and lovely stage actress, the aptly named Desiree Armfeldt (Dahlbeck). However, Desiree has plans of her own as she is also seeing the contentious Count Carl Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle). Keeping with the theme of the film, Malcolm is also cheating on his wife (Margit Carlqvist), but his thoughts on marriage aren’t exactly traditional as we learn when he delivers the film’s funniest line with perfect tone and pomp, “My wife may cheat on me, but if anyone touches my mistress I become a tiger!”
The drama between the sexes plays out over the course of 108 minutes and while it doesn’t deal with the more existential aspects of Bergman’s films I find far more enjoyable, this is still a quality film and one I watched twice before writing up this review.
The features included are minimal, including a video conversation between frequent Criterion contributor and Bergman scholar Peter Cowie and executive producer of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, Jorn Donner. The conversation is interesting and actually curiously combative in some ways. Secondly there is a video introduction to the film by Bergman from 2003 and unless I am mistaken one of these is included on almost every Bergman film Criterion has released, at least those films SVT Svensk Television produced one for. Finally there’s the theatrical trailer and two essays, one by Pauline Kael and the other by John Simon, of which I referenced earlier, in a 24-page illustrated booklet.
This was my first time seeing Smiles of a Summer Night, a film credited with giving Bergman pretty much directorial freedom on subsequent projects after Bergman won for Best Poetic Humor at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. A sweet result for a director that would two years later bring us one of my favorite films, The Seventh Seal, as well as a number of other projects, too many to mention here.
As to whether you should buy this release I would hope you would have that figured by now. For those of you wondering if it’s worth the upgrade form Criterion’s previous 2004 DVD release I can’t tell you for certainty the audio and picture are an improvement, and looking at and comparing screen captures at DVD Beaver it doesn’t look like the image is a massive upgrade. Like I said in the opening, I would buy this for my own collection as a lover of Bergman’s works and the fact I enjoyed the film, but I don’t believe it will be for everyone.
