In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
William Makepeace Thackery once observed that “love makes fools of us all” and those words might as well be emblazoned across the opening screen of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. The characters in this film take themselves and their love lives very seriously, but Bergman’s gently arch tone suggests that we needn’t do likewise.
Bergman also wrote the screenplay, which involves a complex web of relationships among members of a Swedish household and their extended circle of friends in the early 20th century. Frederik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) is a prosperous lawyer married to the beautiful and much younger Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), who appears more like his daughter than his wife. After two years, their marriage has yet to be consummated. Also in the household: Henrik (Björn Bjelfvenstam), an awkward young man studying to be a minister who is Fredrik’s son from a previous marriage, and Petra (Harriet Andersson), a servant who is probably the sexually wisest of the bunch. Currently she’s the recipient of unwanted advances from Henrik, who really has the hots for his stepmother, and she for him, although that won’t be revealed until later.
When Henrik’s old lover Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck) comes to town with her theater company, of course he buys tickets for himself and Anne, and of course he omits to mention having had a relationship with the company’s star. In truth, Fredrik wants to get back together with Desiree, a desire complicated by the fact that she’s currently having an affair with army officer Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle). Another point of interest: Desiree has a son about the right age to be Fredrik’s. And to make things even more complicated, the Count’s neglected wife Charlotte (Margit Carlqvist, dripping with passive aggression as the last refuge of the powerless) is an old friend of Anne.
With such a tangled web of relationships, it’s no surprise that jealousies are aroused, confessions are made, and lots of people become unhappy. Desiree decides the best way to clear up the mess is to invite everyone to her mother’s (Naima Wifstrand) country home for Midsummer Night, the shortest night of the year and, as Shakespeare knew, a magical night during which the thorniest problems may find resolution. This setup is reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel where the entire cast is marooned in a snowbound hotel or isolated island, but Smiles of a Summer Night is a comedy, not a murder mystery, and several silly moves that might have ended in death don’t feel threatening as they would in a more naturalistic piece.
When someone has achieved the kind of international success that Ingmar Bergman has, it’s easy to forget that he was once a struggling director known mainly in his home country. Bergman had directed 15 films prior to Smiles of a Summer Night, and while many had been well-received, two of his most recent, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and Dreams (1955) had not. And to state the obvious, no one knew that acknowledged classics like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both 1957) lay in the near future.
Bergman was not in a great place personally at this time either: while married to his third wife, Gun Grut, he had also been conducting a rather public affair with actor Harriet Anderson which was coming to an end and was about to take up with another of his actors in his “repertory company,” Bibi Andersson. Not that I’m excusing adultery or saying that Bergman was the person most wronged in any of the situations he created, but it still sounds like a lot to deal with. Anyway, the real mystery may be how Bergman found the inspiration for this film, which is far more light-hearted than his previous output, in the midst of such personal and professional turmoil.
I have a hard time remembering the correct title for this film, since in my mind it seems like it should be A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so much does it share in spirit with Shakespeare’s comedy. Bergman takes it to a new level, however: four couples in this movie start the fateful night with unhappy situations and find it sorted before dawn breaks, and no I don’t feel bad about spoiling a movie over 70 years old whose story is well-known through other media. If there’s no enchanted forest and no magic of the supernatural variety, a spacious Swedish country home and the enchanted season of high summer serve as reasonable substitutes. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 237
Technical details: 109 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; Swedish.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (one disc).
Extras: video introduction by Ingmar Bergman, recorded in his theater on Fårö Island, and produced in 2003 for SVT Svensk Television; video conversation between Peter Cowie and Jörn Donner on the role played by this film in Bergman’s career; the film’s Swedish trailer; illustrated booklet include a 1961 review by Pauline Kaael and an essay by John Simon.
Fun Fact: Smiles of a Summer Night may be best known today as the source material for Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 musical A Little Night Music, which has the advantage of being in English and being regularly produced around the country.
Parting Thought: One overriding theme in Smiles of a Summer Night is that love cannot be constrained by arbitrary social rules or conventions—maybe you can hold it down for a while but inevitably it escapes. That sounds like common sense today, and even in 1950s Sweden things appear to be moving in that direction. What did Bergman gain by setting this film about 50 years in the past?
