Smiles of a Summer Night is something of a cinematic odd-one-out: far and away Ingmar Bergman's lightest film, it forms a stepping stone between this director's bittersweet early works (Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika) and his outwardly doom-laden mid-period masterpieces (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries). It proceeds from the assumption that everyone always falls for the wrong person, and that every single one of the film's characters - invited to a weekend away in the country - needs to get laid very quickly. Each time two of the film's characters look likely to get it on, somebody makes a thoughtless and passion-killing remark, lips betraying hips, and both they and we are back to square one (or first base).
Bergman displays a previously unseen but entirely welcome silly streak, putting pompous lawyer hero Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) in a floppy nightcap and pushing him into a puddle; the heavy sense of Fate evoked in the director's other films is here less a curse than a blessing, as witnessed when the cord wrapped around a suicidal preacher's neck breaks, leading him to stumble across the one woman whose love can save him. It's very fast, often very funny, quite sexy, and easily the most quotable of all Bergman movies, with lines as finely honed as Shakespeare's ("you have that perfection which perfection lacks", "a gentleman does not face a rival deprived of his trousers"), nestling alongside an early mission statement from a filmmaker already showing signs of the wisened old man he would emerge as: "I am tired of people, but that does not prevent me from loving them."
Smiles of a Summer Night is available on DVD through Tartan.
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