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Highly Overrated But Still Good

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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.

Fredrik Egerman is troubled; he has a young wife whom he fears he loves as a doting father than a husband. He seeks help from an old flame, Desiree, who is having an affair with a pompous soldier, Count Malcolm. Desiree invites both men and their wives and Egerman's gloomy son Henrik to her mother's country house for the weekend ...This touching, funny and beautifully observed comedy of sexual manners is one of my favourite Bergman films, made just before he was about to become a key figure in world cinema with movies like Det Sjunde Inseglet and Smultronstället. If you only know him for his heavy-going introspective dramas like Persona and Viskningar Och Rop, check this out as a means of contrast. The story is wonderfully sweet, the characters are sharp and brilliantly played by the entire ensemble and the dialogue will make you chuckle throughout (particularly Wifstrand as the dotty mother with the short attention span). As with all his work, it's Bergman's insight into the universal frailties of human nature that makes the movie so touching; we have a man who has married for beauty not love, a femme fatale who is tired of twisting men around her finger, young lovers who careen between ecstatic joy and suicidal misery, a man who foolishly ranks his pride above all else, and a self-loathing wife who can't stop loving a cheating husband. Bergman dances these characters around each other, making his points with subtle skill and entertaining us with style and wit. The four Swedish female leads - Dahlbeck, Jacobsson, Andersson and Carlqvist - are all stunningly beautiful women. Loosely remade twice; once as a Stephen Sondheim musical (A Little Night Music) and also as a charming Woody Allen farce (A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy). English title - Smiles Of A Summer Night.

In the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the successful fifty years old lawyer Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) has been married for three years with his naive nineteen years old wife Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), who is still virgin. His adult son from his former marriage, Henrik (Björn Bjelvenstam), lives in celibate preparing to be a priest. Their servant is the young and futile Petra (Harriet Andersson), who easily falls in love for every man. When Frederik goes to the theater with Anne, he sees the actress and his former mistress Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck) and he meets her alone in her dressing room after the performance. They go to her house, Frederik falls in one puddle and she gives the robe and the pajamas of her present lover, the military Count Carl Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle), who is married with Anne's friend Countess Charlotte Malcolm (Margit Carlquist). However, Malcolm unexpectedly arrives and after the unpleasant encounter of the trio, Desiree ends their relationship. On the next morning, Desiree plots a weekend in her mother's summer real state with Frederik, Anne, Henrik, Malcolm and Charlotte, with the intention of seducing Frederik again. Along the night, with the three smiles of love, four couples are formed."Sommarnattens Leende" is a delightful, cynical and witty romantic comedy with wonderful dialogs and situations. Showing a magnificent art direction and cinematography, this sardonic story discloses three different types of love: the pure of the youngsters, represented by Anne and Henrik; the silly and quite naive, represented by the maid Petra and the groom Frid; and the cynical and malicious of the arrogant Malcolm and Charlotte and the Machiavellian Desiree and Frederik. In the DVD, Ingmar Bergman explains the importance of this movie in his career, with the recognition of the Sweden Industry giving independence for him after the worldwide success of "Sommarnattens Leende" inclusive in Cannes Festival. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "Sorrisos de Uma Noite de Amor" ("Smiles of a Night of Love")

Throughout a career that has spanned six decades, Ingmar Bergman has not been known as a director of light comedies of manners. When certain landmark titles come to mind (THE SEVENTH SEAL, PERSONA), I get images of deeply meditative poetry which, through their iconic imagery, often delve much deeper into the layers of his characters' hidden and exposed feelings and bring forth subtle yet multiple meanings to his unique stories. So when coming across one of his earlier works -- SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT -- with only the knowledge of it being the movie that brought him into international acclaim on the cusp of THE SEVENTH SEAL and little else, I was prepared to view yet another of his ultra-serious tapestries of reflection that would leave me thinking and thinking and thinking.However, I was most surprised when, from the get-go, SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT opened in on a high note. A farce in the tradition of the most refined English or French comedies, sharply influenced by Shakespeare, it opens in on three couples about to realize who they are in relation to one another, and to the person they are meant to be with. Frederik Egerman is married to Anne, a woman about the age of his son Henrik. He has not been able to consummate his marriage to her because he prefers she remain a virgin. However, he has a lover in Desiree, a stage actress who reveals to him her son is also named Frederik (for reasons that are clear to us, even though she never verbalizes it). She is also carrying on an affair with Count Malcolm who is married to Charlotte, though the last two probably look like they would rather be divorced as they seem to hate each other. At the same time, Petra, the maid, is brazenly offering herself to Henrik -- the woman literally oozes sex in every scene she's in.These characters converge at a dinner at Desiree's estate that she's planned because she wants to take matters into her own hand in regards to these people, also because she has an invested interest at hand. Her mother has prepared a love potion and has served it to her guests, who drink from it, bringing forth unusual consequences to them all.Deliciously wicked from start to finish, SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT crackles with kinetic energy, a razor-sharp script, and strong characters. The men are all clueless of what is around them which makes for a splendid farce. The women, on the other hand, all fare much better in Bergman's movie since all are variations of female assertiveness which places them in a position ages ahead of the time-line of the story, and therefore, the ultimate controllers of destiny. Magic is a feminine science, so it's appropriate when Desiree's mother -- a woman who has a morbid sense of humor -- dictates to her hapless guests the ingredients of her potion. Even Anne, who at first shows signs of being much too sensitive for her own good, toughens up quite a bit when Charlotte comes to visit and lets her in on her husband's affair by throwing it right back and effectively silencing her into dullness.A beautiful and quite touching comedy, SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT is a movie that makes for a perfect introduction into Ingmar Bergman's work even when it's the only flat-out slapstick he's directed and all of his movies following this one are much graver in nature. It features his trademark closeups of actors facing the camera, all conveying more than their faces would register initially, which has become the benchmark of Bergman's cinema.