EXPERT WRITE-OFF: Still Amused by SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT?
Written: Jun 26 '00 (Updated Apr 05 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Superb direction, human insights, photography and acting.
Cons: A film so imitated that salacious imitations may appeal more to modern audiences.
The Bottom Line: SMILES ON A SUMMER NIGHT: bitter-sweet farce involving eight people thrown together on Midsummer's Night, one of most influential films in the last half of the 20th Century.
macresarf1's Full Review: Smiles of a Summer Night
Once, driving through the mountains of Montana in late June, we picked up a young fellow by the roadside. He was heading home, five miles away. As he shyly climbed into the car, I said, "What a glorious afternoon!"
He squinted at the sun low in the West. "Yup," he agreed, "but better enjoy it. In another month or so, we might have an early snow here."
That remark pretty much expresses the message of SOMMARNATTENS LEENDE (Smiles of a Summer Night), from Sweden, another place where Winter is never far away. The climax of the film occurs on Midsummer's Night, the summer solstice, when traditionally in Northern Europe, people celebrate the fragile glory of sunlight and love, on the longest day of the year. Parties are held, couples are betrothed, marriages take place, love affairs are consummated, children are conceived. Human treasures of the spirit and flesh are laid up against the inevitable bills of January.
In SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, several couples from a chilly clime find themselves in the sweaty grip of summer and react appropriately.
A 19th Century Lawyer Fredrik Egermann (Gunnar Bjornstrand) has tickets to see his old mistress, Actress Diseree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck), perform in a visiting touring company. He returns home to learn that his jealous, embittered son Henrik (Bjorn Bjelfvenstam) is visiting. After an argument with Henrik, a seminary student, he retires for a nap with his beautiful young second wife Anne (Ulla Jacobsson). Anne is prepared to make love, but Fredrik, in his sleep, repeats the name of the actress, Diseree. Fredrik and Anne have been married some time, but the marriage is unconsummated.
That evening, at the theater, Anne recognizes how her husband takes part in the ovation Diseree receives at her first entrance. When they return home, they find Henrik the son drunk, spouting Lutheran pieties to their sexy, flirtatious maid Petra (Harriet Andersson), all the time putting the make on her. Henrik is unhappy because, he says, he has had bad sex with his girl. Father is unsympathetic. Their argument resumes.
Fredrik escapes to Diseree's dressing room at the theater, where he confesses, his wife "likes me as if I were her father." Although she has a date with a dragoon at a party later, after Fredrik falls into a puddle, Diseree and her maid take him back to dry off at her home. There, embarrassed and feeling rejected, he learns that she has had a son, unknown to him, and has named him Fredrik. This revelation disturbs him, and he suggests she is not fit to have a child. She slaps him across the face.
At that point, Count Malcom, Diseree's Dragoon boyfriend arrives, mud spattered himself from a fall, eager to make the most of a 20 hour leave -- with a little time out to spend with his wife Charlotte. He brusquely banishes Fredrik in only a borrowed nightgown from Diseree's house.
After Fredrik's departure, Diseree and the Count argue, and she hits him with a poker, all of which she relates in a visit to her rather lubricious mother (Naima Wifstrand). Mom says the same kinds of things happened to her when she was married to Dad. Diseree persuades Mom to invite everyone to a party at their country estate on Midsummer's Eve to settle matters, and bring everyone together. Mom reluctantly agrees, saying: "You can never protect a single human being from suffering. That's what makes one so terribly tired!"
Next we meet Countess Charlotte Malcom (Margit Carlqvist), who is trading shots at target practice with the Count in his gun room. Charlotte is a modern woman, an incomparable beauty in a film full of incomparable beauties. She is deadly with sex or pistols at sixty paces. After he infuriates her, she gets together with young Anne Eggerman, and the stage is literally set for a series of sad and funny confrontations on Midsummer's Eve at the estate. As Petra, the beautiful maid, says later to her lover, the country house footman, : "Smiles" on a summer night lead to marriage.
To which Frid the Footman (Ake Fridell) replies: "The fun is over. Now I'm on my way to Hell!"
SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT is a French farce told by a Swede. It is one of the most notable early works of Ingmar Bergman, who burst upon the film world in 1956 with THE SEVENTH SEAL. Overnight almost, an art house boom market for foreign language films was created. Filmgoers were astounded to learn that Bergman, working winters on the stage, and summers in film, with his artistic family, utilizing master cameramen Sven Nkvist and Gunnar Fischer, had already created a body of a dozen films, most of them unknown in America. Films from SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT (1955) to NIGHT IS MY FUTURE (1947) were rushed into renewed distribution.
Swedish farce may be an acquired taste. I remember my first wife Bunty was told that the films of Ingmar Bergman were very sexy and funny, "something like Jacques Tati." She and a friend went late to SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT. Half way through, her friend said, "Bunty, this film isn't French, it's Swedish. And I can't understand what in the world they are doing!" They both stalked out, seeking another MR HULOT'S HOLIDAY.
Even modern audiences who have seen the musical A Little Night Music, or Woody Allen's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY, both based on SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, may agree. In 1955, Americans were willing to make the effort to wade through complicated relationships to get to what they thought might be salaciously amusing and sophisticated. Today, they find the content, if not the wit, in beer and car commercials.
In any case, SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT is a landmark in the History of International Film. Ingmar Bergman went on to create two dozen more films, a number of them recognized masterpieces, and he is considered one to the true geniuses of the Cinema. For that reason alone, you should consider seeing it, and the film that catapulted him into the public mind: THE SEVENTH SEAL (1956).
Note: If you have seen THE SEVENTH SEAL, you may remember Gunnar Bjornstrand, who plays Fredrik Eggerton in SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, as the practical squire to Max von Sydow's mystical knight in that very different picture.
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
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