In the modern comedies, she is a strapping goddess with teeth big enough to eat you and a jaw and neck to swallow you down Bergman himself is said to refer to her as “the Woman Battleship.”īut in Smiles of a Summer Night, though the roles of the sexes are basically the same, the perspective is different. Bergman’s typical comedy heroine, Eva Dahlbeck, is the woman as earth mother who finds fulfillment in accepting the infantilism of the male. (J. M. Barrie used to say the same thing in the cozy, complacent Victorian terms of plays like What Every Woman Knows it’s the same concept that Virginia Woolf raged against-rightly, I think-in T hree Guineas.) The straying male is just a bad child-but it is the essence of maleness to stray. The female strength lies in convincing the man that he’s big enough to act like a man in the world, although secretly he must acknowledge his dependence on her. In Bergman’s modern comedies, marriages are contracts that bind the sexes in banal boredom forever. Everything is subtly improved in the soft light and delicate, perfumed atmosphere. ![]() How different it is to watch the same actor and actress making love in the stuck elevator of Secrets of Women and in the golden pavilion of Smiles of a Summer Night. Anyone can always turn out the light.” I would have thought you couldn’t get a laugh on that one unless you tried it in an old folks’ home, but Bergman is a man of the theater-audiences break up on it.) Bergman’s sensual scenes are much more charming, more unexpected in the period setting: when they are deliberately unreal they have grace and wit. (Though I must admit I can’t find justification for such bright exchanges as the man’s question, “How could a woman ever love a man?” and her response: “A woman’s view is seldom based on aesthetics. There are four of the most talented and beautiful women ever to appear in one film: as the actress, the great Eva Dahlbeck, appearing onstage, giving a house party, and in one inspired suspended moment, singing “Freut euch des Lebens” the impudent love-loving maid, Harriet Andersson-as a blonde, but as opulent and sensuous as in her other great roles Margit Carlqvist as the proud, unhappy countess Ulla Jacobsson as the eager virgin.Įven Bergman’s epigrams are much improved when set in the quotation marks of a stylized period piece. The film becomes an elegy to transient love: a gust of wind and the whole vision may drift away. The sexual chases and the round dance are romantic, nostalgic the coy bits of feminine plotting are gossamer threads of intrigue. The film is bathed in beauty, removed from the banalities of short skirts and modern-day streets and shops, and removed in time, it draws us closer.īergman found a high style within a set of boudoir farce conventions: in Smiles of a Summer Night, boudoir farce becomes lyric poetry. He not only tied up the themes in the intricate plot structure of a love roundelay, but in using the lush period setting, he created an atmosphere that saturated the themes. Perhaps it was this distance that made it possible for him to create a work of art out of what had previously been mere clever ideas. Smiles of a Summer Night was made after Bergman directed a stage production of The Merry Widow, and he gave the film a turn-of-the-century setting. There were scattered lovely moments, as if Bergman’s eye were looking ahead to the visual elegance of Smiles of a Summer Night, but the plot threads were still woolly. Structurally, they were sketchy and full of flashbacks. They were all set in the present, and the themes were plainly exposed the dialogue, full of arch epigrams, was often clumsy, and the ideas, like the settings, were frequently depressingly middle class and novelettish. It was the distillation of elements he had worked with for several years, in the 1952 Secrets of Women (originally called Waiting Women), the 1954 A Lesson in Love, and the early 1955 Dreams these episodic comedies of infidelity are like early attempts or drafts. ![]() Late in 1955, Ingmar Bergman made a nearly perfect work-the exquisite carnal comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.
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