Watch A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy For Free

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Occasionally, a film emerges that is a stellar film ruined by a less than stellar title. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is a film that may fit into that category. Although not a masterpiece, by any means, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is a fine film by writer-director Woody Allen. Released in 1982, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy involves an inventor who hosts a weekend gathering of friends that quickly turns into professions of love altering the lives of everyone involved. Woody Allen plays the role of the idiosyncratic inventor who is experiencing a lack of love and sexual attention from his wife. They invite two couples to spend the weekend with them in their cottage. Maxwell (Tony Roberts) a physician and Andrew's (Woody Allen) best friend who has brought with him a new muse, a nurse that works in his office make up one couple. The other couple that attends is the cousin of Andrew's wife, Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) Leopold (José Ferrer). Leopold is a philosophy professor who has always spoken negatively of marriage before meeting his fiancé. Unbeknownst to Andrew, Leopold's fiancé turns out to be Ariel (Mia Farrow), his former girlfriend. The spark is reignited between Ariel and Andrew, but a new flame emerges between Ariel and Maxwell, also. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy has not been one of my favorite discoveries through this Woody Allen project I've been working through. There were some signature Woody Allen aspects that kept me happy enough, however. The music in this film was as divine as the music always is in every Woody Allen film. The film was opened with a discussion on metaphysical philosophy which will always be something this philosophy minor will be all-in for. The film was also shot beautifully with gorgeous images of landscape, animals, and geography gracing the screen. All-in-all, there is enough in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy to tide over the loyal Allen-ist but certainly not the feast some of his other work is.

"A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" is one of Woody Allen's movies making fun of rich people's relationships. Based on an Ingmar Bergman movie that I haven't seen, it depicts some couples spending the weekend with an inventor (Allen) and his wife (Mary Steenburgen). The six of them then proceed to start having affairs with each other! The movie's downside is of course that Woody Allen started obsessing on neurotic rich people having affairs, and eventually reached an all-time nadir with "Everyone Says I Love You". Even so, what the movie itself shows is some really funny stuff. More than anything, it demonstrates that Allen is at his best when just trying to be funny ("Take the Money and Run", "Bananas", "Sleeper"). Other than that, the movie has some typical Woody Allen-style lines, and an almost mystifying ending. Really interesting. Also starring José Ferrer, Mia Farrow (in her first appearance in an Allen movie), Tony Roberts and Julie Hagerty (of "Airplane!" fame).

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the birth of philosophical movements that have since dominated Western thinking: phenomenological existentialism and analytic philosophy. Woody Allen's concerns have always been most identified with the former, which has its roots in European thought, though the latter has been the predominant approach even during periods when the existential approach became particularly popular among the artistic community.Wisely, he combines the realities and spiritual fantasies of sex and love in this story of sexual escapades in the form of some geometric shape. As in many of his other films, he exemplifies the dichotomy between society and the rest of existence, in this case taking place at a time when technology was still in its infancy, so that we can see more clearly the roots of the schism, and clipping a few laughs Woody would never in his life pass up, involving his signature nebbishy caricature, an inventor here, peddling a bicycle with propellers on the top, or trying to core an apple or debone a fish with some ridiculous contraption. However, aside from these brief scenes, the movie is hardly a screwball farce. It has an airy sense of tongue-in-cheekness but that airiness results more in a head in the clouds. Woody's character's most important invention, a spirit ball, seems to generate an actual connection to an abstract metaphysical realm of the supernatural.He makes a living as a Wall Street stockbroker, yet we see him exploring the conceptual otherworldly realm. He lives in New York City, but he owns a house in the country to which he escapes with his wife in the summer. He is also inwardly at odds his sexual passions. He is torn between his feelings for his wife, whom he loves, and his libidinous desire to regain his lost opportunity with Mia Farrow's character.Despite this being one of Woody's more light-hearted efforts, he definitely explores some of the most universal themes he's ever analyzed in his body of work, like lost opportunities, perfect moments, the victory of romantic ideals over real life enactments of them. The memory's yearning for second chances drives the farce. All of the characters struggle clumsily to seize the clock in assorted ways, from the use of a camera to Woody's spirit box, an attempt to encapsulate the world's theoretical energies that in a way mirrors an early movie contraption.Where most of Woody's films chronicle the seriocomic moral evolution of his characters, those in this light and accessible little outing by the characteristically comforting Woody seem to increase their needs for indulgence in a portrayal of their intellectual emptiness and intemperance. What would've made the movie less accessible but doubly interesting would be a soundtrack entirely comprised of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Blood Sugar Sex Magik. On a purely logical level, it fits.

Woody Allen can surprise every once in a while, and Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was a slight surprise. If I had heard more praise for it then I would've expected whatever, but it seemed to be one of his more "minor" works, something he wrote and directed very quickly in the midst of working on his big project Zelig. Expecting just a simple trifle, maybe along the lines of a Scoop or Manhattan Murder Mytsery, I got something more substantial. It draws upon sources of Bergman (Smiles of a Summer Night, making it Allen's only homage of Bergman that isn't dark and depressing), Shakespeare (for obvious reasons of the title, but also for the magical element), and maybe just something else that sprang out of Allen that I couldn't really tell.It's a comedy about mis-matched lovers, and how over the course of a day and night old wounds are opened, old flames come up, and lust is purged for better or worse. It's Woody Allen as an inventor with wife Mary Steenburgen inviting a philosophy professor (Jose Ferrer) and his to-be wife (Mia Farrow, first Allen movie and one of her best), who Allen's character Andrew used to date once, er twice, er three times. Then there's Julie Hagerty and Tony Robbins, good friends of the hosting couple, and with Robbins feeling some hardcore affection for Farrow, and the marriage between Allen and Steenburgen being in momentary peril (and Ferrer's "one last hurrah" ideal in Hagerty), it becomes like a twister game of affections and immense sexual stimulus.Whether or not this all makes sense is besides the point. Allen isn't out here so much for logic- how could he with laughable old self-flying machines and that weird magic box that springs out spirits into the night- as he is for personalities and using his effortless ear for dialog. Some of this is really funny, and even clever, like the sly joke with the bathtubs filling up with water (and Robbins/Farrow 'falling asleep', or with the near sex scene on top of the stove in the kitchen. So much of Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy tries to deny the whimsy of the setting, but by the end it becomes undeniable. Rarely has infidelity been this much fun, or with such good performances, in a film by this director, and it should be marked as one of his underrated (or maybe not widely seen) piecfes; for the nature montage early on alone, which is like the forest version of the opening of Manhattan, is worth viewing.