In
1955, after making two commercially unsuccessful
films and entering a period of personal and financial
crisis, Ingmar Bergman wrote and directed Smiles
of a Summer Night, whose sheer exuberance seemed
to fly in the face of his predicaments. It is, as
Pauline Kael suggests in an essay reprinted in the
new Criterion release’s liner notes, in some
ways the work for which many of Bergman’s
fifteen previous films were merely rough drafts.
It is a witty battle of the sexes in which a variety
of couples, married and otherwise, get jumbled up
before being set back with their proper mates (though
they may not have be the ones they started the film
with).
Having gotten
the form right, he never returned to it on this
scale.
The film’s
success—it won Grand Prix for Best Comedy
at Cannes—helped bring Bergman considerable
attention and artistic freedom. As Bergman himself
observed in a 2003 interview included on the Criterion
DVD, “[S]ince the success of Smiles of
a Summer Night, I’ve never had anybody
interfering in my business. I’ve done whatever
I wanted.”
But it was his
next film, The Seventh Seal, that brought
him a sustained world audience and introduced the
themes that audiences would soon come to expect
in a Bergman film. After Smiles of a Summer
Night, his stories are darker, his themes more
openly existential, and his visual style becomes
less crowded. In time, Bergman’s films would
exhibit a momentum that often relies as much on
editing rhythm as it does on the spoken word.
Smiles of
a Summer Night is thus a languid comedic gem
to linger on not only because it is a seemingly
perfect comedy, but because it stands as a transition
marker in Bergman’s growth as a director.
Kael
rightly argues that Smiles of a Summer Night’s
relatively remote setting (turn-of-the-century Sweden)
draws us closer to the story and helps it avoid
the banal failings of earlier Bergman modern, middle-class
offerings. (It also helps us laugh more readily
at the characters’ pomposities and artificially
stiff cultural rules.) There’s a luminous,
even magical quality to the film that seems downright
intoxicating. Of course, all the film’s talk
about magic and pagan rituals of love probably help
too.
Conventional religion
appears in the film as well, in conflict with all
the talk of love. (This is a Bergman film, after
all, comedy or no.) Henrik Egerman, the son of a
successful, self-satisfied lawyer, is studying to
enter the church and comically exhibits the conflicting
impulses of a young, anxious romantic. Whatever
his conscious motives may be, we soon realize that
his religious study is an attempt to sublimate his
sexual desires, and he is, in fact, in love with
his father’s second wife, the nineteen-year-old
Anne, although he can’t find the means to
express it forcefully enough. (In their first scene
together, he reads a flesh-denying religious tract
to her while she does needlepoint: “Virtue
arms the virtuous man, and although temptation is
an attack, it is not a defeat.”)
In turn, we soon
discover that the young wife’s affections
aren’t directed back to her husband Fredrik,
and they have yet to consummate their two-year-old
marriage. For his part, the elder Egerman finds
his attraction to an old flame warming again. The
actress Desirée Armfeldt, with whom he had
an affair for two years after the death of his first
wife, is more mature and knowing when it comes to
interaction between the sexes, and she represents
a union Egerman strongly misses in his marriage
to a younger woman he doesn’t fully understand.
(Indeed, Egerman groups Anne and his son under the
common term, ‘children,’ and tells Desirée
his home sometimes “seems like some kindergarten
for love.”)
The real trouble
starts when the elder Egerman murmurs Desirée’s
name in his sleep, just hours before the couple
attends one of her performances. Anne leaves the
performance early in tears (after sizing up her
competition), and just hours later, Egerman makes
an overture to his former mistress and runs afoul
of her new lover (a jealous military officer who
happens to be married; when he arrives, he tells
Desirée he has twenty hours’ leave:
“Three to get here, nine with you, five with
my wife, and three to return”). Once Desirée
arranges to gather all the players at her mother’s
country estate—the three Egermans, the jealous
military officer and his wife—with the purpose
of righting the tilted scales, Bergman’s comedy
takes on its charming, magical glow.
The shift to the
country is critical here. In the city, the couples
would have been thwarted indefinitely. In the countryside,
they find their problems resolved, thanks to previously
unsuspected natural forces. During dinner, for instance,
Desirée’s mother warns her guests that,
according to legend, the wine they are about to
drink
is pressed from
grapes whose juice gushes out like drops of blood
against the pale grape skin. It is also said that
to each cask filled with this wine was added a
drop of milk from a young mother’s breast
and a drop of seed from a young stallion. These
lend to the wine’s secret seductive powers.
Whoever drinks hereof does so at his own risk
and must answer for himself.
As they drink
the wine, each character in turn calls upon the
wine to answer their secret wishes. A primitive
religion is at work here, blending fertility with
nature’s own mysterious forces. Just as Desirée
advances her plan for her mother’s guests,
so the gods do as well. Hence the film’s title:
“The summer night has three smiles,”
one character says to his lover. The first comes
“between midnight and dawn, when young lovers
open their hearts and loins.” The second smile
is for “the jesters, the fools and the incorrigible.”
And the third smile is for “the sad and dejected,
for the sleepless and lost souls, for the frightened
and the lonely.”
Ironically (and
appropriately for Bergman) the happy denouement
doesn’t follow conventional Christian lines
of moral virtue: one man will end up with another’s
wife, one will leave his wife for an actress and
only one man will find his marriage restored to
him. And throughout the movement towards the right
and natural couplings, Bergman does something he
continues to delight in through the years: he shows
us pretentious men making fools of themselves.
A
glossary of words without which Bergman’s
films cannot be appreciated would probably begin
with ‘humiliation’ and move quickly
to its bitterly missed sibling, ‘love.’
Of course, love is far more difficult to define
than humiliation (telling, isn’t it?), but
it could be defined for Bergman’s purposes
(if incompletely) as trusting another person enough
to open yourself up to them in the hopes of communicating
in an honest and immediate way. (Often, that communication
is wordless: a touch, for Bergman, could complete
a life, if not a film, sadly.)
The two are inextricably
entwined for Bergman. His most aggressive characters
routinely inflict humiliation on those weaker than
themselves, particularly when they’re spurned
by the object of their desire. These aggressive
characters are almost always men, who don’t
fare well in Bergman’s world, although occasionally
a particularly masculine woman will be allowed into
Bergman’s sadistic world of aggressors. And
the fear of humiliation keeps a fair percentage
of Bergman’s characters from stepping forward
and declaring their love, in their own right. (As
the elder Egerman says of his friendship with Desirée,
she is “The only person to whom I can show
myself in all my unsightly nakedness.”)
Think, for example,
of the haunted sisters in Cries and Whispers:
Karin, hard-edged and inflexible, lashes out at
the servant Anna (herself a yielding, mothering
figure), and quickly recovers her masculine spite
after a brief expression of love (through touching)
with the frightened but physically expressive Maria.
(A similar pairing of masculine / feminine opposites—and
a preoccupation with touching—appears in the
sisters of The Silence.)
The love / humiliation
struggle runs through the Bergman canon, but with
the pompous gestures its male characters make one
against the other, Smiles of a Summer Night is one
of its most purely enjoyable permutations (if only
because it is ultimately harmless). It also contains
one of the clearest speeches Bergman offers about
how his most knowledgeable women in these 1950s
comedies deal with men and their demands to be treated
with ‘dignity.’ The speech is given
by Desirée in the play in which we see her
perform early in the film:
We women have
the right to commit manifold sins against husbands,
lovers and sons, excepting one: to offend their
dignity. If we do so, we are foolish and must
bear the consequences. Rather, we should make
of a man’s dignity our foremost ally and
caress it, soothe it, speak fondly to it and handle
it as our dearest toy. Only then do we have a
man in our hands, at our feet, or wherever else
we want him at that particular moment.
It’s not
the most liberated role for a woman to play, of
course, but then again, it doesn’t speak well
of Bergman’s men either, does it? Framed in
a self-consciously distant period setting and suspended
in the delicate framework of comedy, though, it
sparkles. |