Smiles of a Summer Night

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) brought Ingmar Bergman his first international success, and it is a sparkling sex comedy, nothing like the austere dramas his name now calls to mind. It won a prize at Cannes for its "poetic humour" and opened the door to the extraordinary run of films that followed.

Among the bourgeoisie on a turn-of-the-century summer weekend, Bergman 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 arrange their reshuffling over a single enchanted night. He writes with Mozartian poise, keeping wit and melancholy in balance without losing the feeling underneath, and his ensemble, including Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck, plays all of it with feather-light precision.

Its afterlife on stage and screen has been remarkable. Stephen Sondheim adapted it into the Broadway musical A Little Night Music (home of "Send in the Clowns"), and Woody Allen reworked it as A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Generous and unexpectedly tender, it shows a side of Bergman that is too often forgotten: the comic miniaturist of desire. Restored and regularly revived, it is one of the most delightful films in his long career, and the best evidence that cinema's great tragedian could, when he chose, be one of its most graceful comic stylists.