Smiles of a Summer Night - 10 January 2010

Principal cast: Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ulla Jacobsson, Bjorn Bjelfvenstam, Eva Dahlbeck, Naima Wifstrand, Jarl Kulle

Film notes: Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens Leende) is a seldom-screened example of Ingmar Bergman’s flair for comedy. Here, with a clear debt to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bergman plays urbanely and philosophically with the classic comedy formula: a confusion of multiply mismatched sexual desires plays havoc with the social order, for a brief time, then resolves by film’s end into happy coupledom ... sort of (Bergman's trademark anti-establishment unorthodoxy and some grimmer themes of his later films are discernible here). Complete with turn-of-the-century counts, actresses, and chambermaids, a potent love potion, and a central character called “Desirée”—all thrown together one weekend at a manor house—the film has a ball with the conventions of drawing-room comedy, bawdy, and farce, enlivening the lot with Shakespearean enchantment.

As for the laughs factor delivered by the master of bleak cinema: “guaranteed to make you laugh out loud”; “a film that has a reputation as the best French farce ever made outside of France”; and (what higher praise than this?) “a bubbly mélange of Lubitsch and Renoir” (James Travers). The rich cinematography of the costumes, the delightfully-drawn characterizations, and the exquisite choreography of bourgeois manners is reminiscent of both Renoir and Ophüls.

Smiles of a Summer Night won the International Poetic Humor Prize for 1956 at Cannes.