The voice on the other end of the phone had a blithely ignorant quality that could only come from a teenager weaned on Taco Bell chalupas, bubblegum boy bands and Freddie Prinze Jr. movies: “‘Miles Until the Night’?”
“No,” I patiently repeated to the clerk at the local Videorama, “‘Smiles of a Summer Night.’”
“Huh? ‘Smiles on a Summer Day’?”
I closed my eyes and counted to five before speaking again: “No. ‘Smiles…of…a…Summer…Night.’” I heard the tappity-tap of a computer keyboard on her end. “It’s Ingmar Bergman,” I added helpfully.
“Who?”
“Bergman.”
“Birdman?”
“Berg-man.”
“You don’t have to get so testy, sir.” Tappity-tap.
“I’m not—”
“Well,” she interrupted, “it seems you’re out of luck anyway. No ‘Smiles of whatever’ here.”
(Drat! This was the sixth video store I’d called in my little burg of Anchorage, Alaska. None of them, it seemed, stocked Swedish art-house flicks.)
“We do, however, have several copies of She’s All That. Would you like to reserve a copy, sir?”
I hung up before my scream pierced her ear.
I couldn’t be too hard on the girl, however. When I was given the assignment to review Bergman’s 1955 sex satire, I must confess I’d never heard of it, either.
Wild Strawberries? Check. Cries and Whispers? You betcha. The Seventh Seal? Of course.
I consider myself a pretty astute movie guy—even with the foreign flicks which I admittedly don’t watch enough of—but Smiles of a Summer Night was one that had slipped past my radar.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. A delightfully frothy romantic comedy is not something that pops to mind when we think of Ingmar Bergman. Death playing chess with a doomed knight—now that’s the dark and dreary Bergman we all know and love.
And now, a word from our sponsors: This review is part of an Epinions Movie Experts Write-off in which several of us are simultaneously dissecting this and three other films—Touch of Evil, Dr. No and Diner. Please visit all the other reviews by my colleagues, posted on this date, by following the links at the bottom of this review.
So there I sat. I had my assignment from Epinions and the deadline for the write-off was looming like a hooded figure with a scythe. I was down to my last video store in Anchorage. I dialed the number with a heavy heart.
No teenybopper this time, but a reasonably intelligent-sounding man who, without so much as a tappity-tap responded quickly with: “Yes, we’ve got that movie.”
I was in my car and headed his way before he could even so much as say “Liv Ullman.”
When I arrived at the video store, my art-house blood began to tingle like French champagne. Not only did they have Smiles of a Summer Night, but they also stocked also every other Bergman classic. Farther down the shelf in the foreign section, there was also a sprinkling of Werner Herzog movies. There’s hope for this city after all, I sighed.
And now, several hours after watching Smiles of a Summer Night, I’m glad to report that there’s hope for anyone who is in need of a delightful, thinking-person’s comedy. As a matter of fact, the flick is good enough that even Miss Videorama Teenybopper might be mildly entertained, despite its obvious lack of well-groomed hunk-o-matics.
Smiles of a Summer Night is filled with sparkling characters, double entendres and lush-but-tame eroticism (it’s the 1950s, remember)—sort of like She’s All That…except waaaaay smarter.
Set in turn-of-the-century Sweden, the movie follows several sets of lovers who pair up in bed-hopping combinations throughout the 108-minute running time. The story mostly centers on Fredrik (Bergman regular Gunnar Bjornstrand), a prim-and-proper lawyer whose second wife Anne (Ulla Jacobsson) is 19 years old and still a virgin, even after two years of marriage. No wonder—Fredrick has “a head that’s as orderly as his desk” a real cold Swedish fish. He’s a cynic who's suppressed all feeling of sentiment. He’s too blind to see that the affections of his teenage wife might be drifting away from him in the wake of their sexless union.
In one of the movie’s many twists, Anne finds herself strangely attracted to her husband’s brooding son, Henrik (Bjorn Bjelfvenstam), a seminary student who fights a daily battle between spirit and flesh. He doesn’t know what to think of those glances his stepmother keeps throwing his way. It also doesn’t help that the family’s flirtatious maid, Petra (Harriet Andersson), does things like unbutton her dress and place his hand on her breast.
At the beginning of the film, Fredrik treats his young wife to a night at the theater where he encounters his old mistress, the actress Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck). Finding himself stirred by old passions, he sneaks out of the house that evening and makes his way to Desiree’s apartment. They’re interrupted in their billing and cooing, however, when Count Malcolm (Jarl Kulle), Desiree’s current lover, enters unexpectedly. The jealous count is enraged at the sight of Fredrik, especially since the cuckold is wearing his nightshirt. It doesn’t help matters that Fredrik’s wife and Malcolm’s wife, Charlotte (Margit Carlqvist), are close friends. Charlotte, meanwhile, has an eye on Fredrik.
With me so far? It’s a soap opera plot whose bubbles come fast and furious (especially in the second half) and it's all spun out with a quick-witted script that makes connecting the dots fun. All the plot strands and various characters come together at the climax of the film when everyone is invited for a weekend getaway to the country mansion of Desiree’s mother. Just as in the lightest of Shakespeare comedies, everything eventually works out for the best with all parties concerned.
If this plot sounds vaguely familiar, perhaps you’re thinking of Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Little Night Music or Woody Allen’s equally-delightful 1982 film A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, both of which were inspired by this film from Bergman.
Even though it came relatively early in his long career, Smiles of a Summer Night shows Bergman’s strong hand behind the camera as he elicits marvelous performances from the entire cast. He also knows how to communicate his vision—whether it’s through lighting, camera angles or editing. Nothing is left to doubt where theme is concerned. These same qualities would also go a long way toward making The Seventh Seal the great film it is a mere one year later.
Perhaps the worst thing that one could say about Smiles of a Summer Day is that it has a stagy atmosphere. Some scenes feel like they’ll never end, as if they’re waiting for an intermission curtain to fall. There’s also a rigidity to the people we’re watching, a formality that renders them into stock types. At times, I felt I was watching an Ibsen play infused with laughing gas. Still, for all its theatricality, the movie never failed to entertain and interest me.
Though the characters are never deeper than the symbolism calls for, the movie is filled with the kind of dialogue that lovers of language can roll around in their minds like a lozenge of delicious hard candy for hours afterward:
Love is a perpetual juggling of three balls, says one character. They’re named heart, word and body. How easy these three can be juggled, yet how easy to drop one.
Or this: Humans treat love as either a battle or a gymnastic exhibition.
Me, I loved the way Bergman sent his characters into tumbling somersaults of romance—and did so with marvelous wit and intelligence, a pair of juggling balls today’s teenybopper comedies so sadly lack.
After fifteen films of mostly local acclaim, the 1956 prize-winning comedy Smiles of a Summer Night at last ushered in an international audience for d...More at Buy.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.