Smiles of a Summer Night

The film that brought Ingmar Bergman his first international success, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) is a sparkling sex comedy quite unlike the austere dramas with which his name is now associated. It won a prize at Cannes for its “poetic humour” and opened the door to the run of masterpieces that followed.

Set among the bourgeoisie of a turn-of-the-century summer, the film assembles a roundelay of mismatched lovers — a complacent lawyer, his unconsummated young bride, a bitter son, a sensual actress — and lets an ageing grande dame orchestrate their reshuffling over a single enchanted night. Bergman writes with Mozartian poise, balancing wit, melancholy and genuine feeling, and his ensemble, including Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck, plays it with feather-light precision.

Its influence has been remarkable: Stephen Sondheim adapted it into the Broadway musical A Little Night Music (home of the song “Send in the Clowns”), and Woody Allen reworked it as A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Sophisticated, generous and unexpectedly tender, it reveals a side of Bergman too often forgotten — the comic miniaturist of desire — and remains one of the most delightful films in his vast body of work. Restored and regularly revived, it endures as proof that the cinema's great tragedian was also, when he chose, one of its most graceful comic stylists.