Ingmar Bergman | Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) / 1955

the natural order of things

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (writer and director) Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) / 1955

 

Along with Jean Renoir’s incomparable Rules of the Game, Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night is my favorite cinematic comedy, a work attune to the writings Marivaux, Molière, and Mozart, while sharing much in common with Shakespeare’s great comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bergman’s masterpiece—as film critic Pauline Kael described it—is an “exquisite carnal comedy,” “a nearly perfect work.”

  

      From the very first scene, as the self-consciously groomed attorney (his beard is one the strangest of film history) Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) efficiently completes his work, we recognize that however hard Egerman has strived to organize a pleasant and fulfilling life for himself, he is doomed to failure. Behind his back, his clerks gossip about his current young wife—just sixteen years of age when he married her—and of the great actress Desirée Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck), with whom Egerman had a two-year affair after his first wife’s death. These scenes set the tone of the first of two parts into which the film is divided, life in the city and life in the country, the first establishing the desired order of Egerman’s selfish life, the second the unraveling of all his perceived structures.

       Although Egerman’s city life is, on the surface, quite pleasant; yet, as we witness his proud strut down the street on his way to pick up photographs he has had taken of his beautiful young wife, we can immediately sense his doom. For the evening he has planned a trip with his attractive doll-wife to the theater, where, incidentally, Desirée is performing. Upon his return home, however, the viewer quickly recognizes that, as in Hamlet’s Denmark, something is rotten in this turn-of-the-century Scandinavian household. Egerman’s son Henrik has just passed the exams for church ministry, but the melancholy young man, caught between his sexual desires and religious principles, is clearly suffering. As he declares later in the film, “If the world is full of sin, I want to sin.” But he is too innocent to successfully woo even Egerman’s flirtatious young maid, Petra.

     Egerman’s wife, Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), is indeed a beauty, but we soon discern that in the one year she has been married to Egerman, she has refused all sexual contact, that she is still a virgin, and her role in this home is similar to that of Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, set only a few years earlier. Their relationship is brilliantly characterized in Egerman’s command that they take a nap before dinner, which Bergman portrays in the uncomfortable image of their two bodies lying side by side, the one sleeping, the other like a young schoolgirl being forced to take a nap. And as she turns toward him to resolve the distance with a kiss, the older man mumbles the name of his former lover Desirée, which results later in Anne’s demand to leave the play the moment she discovers the lead actress shares the same name.

      Like a naughty and chastised boy, Egerman puts his doll wife to sleep before sneaking out to an after-theater encounter with his actress friend. But even here we perceive that Egerman will not get his way, as the witty Desirée spars with him, sending him into a pool of water before humiliating him with the sudden appearance of her current lover, the jealous military officer, Carl- Magnus Malcolm. Faced with Malcolm’s threats, Egerman has no choice but to retreat into the night dressed only in his foe’s nightshirt.

      Malcolm, in turn, is married to a friend of Anne’s, a woman close to her age but far different in her behavior. Charlotte Malcolm, unlike Anne, has taken on her own lovers to avenge her husband’s acts. But while she insists that all men are hairy beasts and that she detests her husband, we recognize in the repetition of her statements—“I hate him, I hate him, I hate him!"—that she is still desperately in love with Carl-Magnus.

    Fortunately, Desirée, who has borne a son that may or may not be Fredrik’s child, is plotting a revenge that will return Egerman to her and restore the necessary order. She convinces her hilariously wise mother to give a grand party, inviting the Egermans and the Malcolms to the country.     

     No sooner have the first guests arrived than Petra, the Egerman housekeeper, discovers a new lover in Frid, the groom, who, in his ritualistic descriptions of the three smiles of the summer night, dominates this second portion of the movie.

    While the men battle it out on the crocket court, Desirée and Charlotte make plans to alter the course of love. At dinner, the elderly Mrs. Armfeldt toasts her guests with a wine, a strange brew containing “a drop of milk from the swelling breasts of a woman who has just given birth to her first child and a drop of seed from a young stallion.” Almost immediately, the young lovers—lovers unknown even to themselves—are affected, as Henrik becomes inconsolable with what he sees as the meaningless chatter of his elders, angrily abandons the dinner table; Anne soon follows with the intention of relieving her headache.

      Henrik’s bedroom, we have been previously told, was the former room of the King who, in love with another man’s wife, had arranged to mechanically transfer the woman’s bed through an opening in the wall into his own room once the husband had fallen asleep. As Henrik clumsily attempts suicide, he falls upon the lever, and Anne and her bed are brought into him. The son and step-mother immediately fall into one another’s arms, kissing. These are the lovers of the first smile of the summer night: young lovers. When Petra, observing the escape of her mistress and Henrik, wishes that she had been such a lover, Frid reassures her: “There are few young lovers in this world. You can almost count them.” Perhaps old Mrs. Armfeldt has expressed it best earlier in this film: “Why is youth so terribly unmerciful? And who has given it permission to be that way?”

    As arranged, Charlotte flirts with Egerman, and when she later escapes the house on her way, apparently, to rendezvous with him, Carl-Magnus jealously follows. As he encounters Egerman in the pavilion, the man who has fought 18 duels challenges his rival (as he has previously told his wife: “I can tolerate someone dallying with my mistress, but if anyone touches my wife, I become a tiger.”) to a game of Russian Roulette.

     After a few hair-raising rounds, the gun explodes in Egerman’s face, showering him in dark powder—but it is only a blank, Carl-Magnus has not used real bullets. So does Carl-Magnus win back his Charlotte, as Petra and Frid toast the second smile of the summer night: for jesters and fools.

 

     Now without son or wife, Egerman is left nearly empty-handed and must accept the love he has had with his mistress as the proper order of things. And, in this sense, Bergman’s great comedy is strangely a testament to the idea of a natural order that transcends the bourgeois conceits of men like Fredrik, in which women become idealized objects. In the end, promiscuous sexuality, even a form of incest—an affair between of a young wife and her stepson—is preferable to the selfishly closeted world of Egerman’s house. As the film closes, Frid toasts the final smile of the night: “For the sad, the depressed, the sleepless, the confused, the frightened, the lonely,” in short, what all of us will surely become.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2007

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2007).