Bergman found a high style within a set of boudoir farce conventions: in Smiles of a Summer Night boudoir farce becomes lyric poetry. The sexual chases and the round dance are romantic, nostalgic; the coy bits of feminine plotting are gossamer threads of intrigue. The film becomes an elegy to transient love: a gust of wind and the whole vision may drift away.

There are four of the most talented and beautiful women ever to appear in one film: as the actress, the great Eva Dahlbeck, appearing on stage, giving a house party and, in one inspired suspended moment, singing "Freut Euch des Lebens"; the impudent love-loving maid, Harriet Andersson -- as a blonde, but as opulent and sensuous as in her other great roles; Margit Carlquist as the proud, unhappy countess; Ulla Jacobsson as the eager virgin.

Even Bergman's epigrams are much improved when set in the quotation marks of a stylized period piece. (Though I must admit I can't find justification for such bright exchanges as the man's question, "What can a woman ever see in a man?" and her response, "Women are seldom interested in aesthetics. Besides, we can always turn out the light." I would have thought you couldn't get a laugh on that one unless you tried it in an old folks' home, but Bergman is a man of the theater -- audiences break up on it.) Bergman's sensual scenes are much more charming, more unexpected in the period setting: when they are deliberately unreal they have grace and wit. How different it is to watch the same actor and actress making love in the stuck elevator of Secrets of Women and in the golden pavilion of Smiles of a Summer Night. Everything is subtly improved in the soft light and delicate, perfumed atmosphere.

In Bergman's modern comedies, marriages are contracts that bind the sexes in banal boredom forever. The female strength lies in convincing the man that he's big enough to act like a man in the world, although secretly he must acknowledge his dependence on her. (J. M. Barrie used to say the same thing in the cozy, complacent Victorian terms of plays like What Every Woman Knows; it's the same concept that Virginia Woolf raged against -- rightly, I think -- in The Three Guineas.) The straying male is just a bad child -- but it is the essence of maleness to stray. Bergman's typical comedy heroine, Eva Dahlbeck, is the woman as earthmother who finds fulfillment in accepting the infantilism of the male. In the modern comedies she is a strapping goddess with teeth big enough to eat you and a jaw and neck to swallow you down; Bergman himself is said to refer to her as "The Woman Battleship."

But in Smiles of a Summer Night, though the roles of the sexes are basically the same, the perspective is different. In this vanished setting, nothing lasts, there are no winners in the game of love; all victories are ultimately defeats -- only the game goes on. When Eva Dahlbeck, as the actress, wins back her old lover (Gunnar Bjšrnstrand), her plot has worked -- but she really hasn't won much. She caught him because he gave up; they both know he's defeated. Smiles is a tragicomedy; the man who thought he "was great in guilt and in glory" falls -- he's "only a bumpkin" This is a defeat we can all share -- for have we not all been forced to face ourselves as less than we hoped to be? There is no lesson, no moral -- the women's faces do not tighten with virtuous endurance (the setting is too unreal for endurance to be plausible). The glorious old Mrs. Armfeldt (Naima Wifstrand) tells us that she can teach her daughter nothing -- or, as she puts it, "We can never save a single person from a single suffering -- and that's what makes us despair."

Smiles of a Summer Night was the culmination of Bergman's "rose" style and he has not returned to it. (The Seventh Seal, perhaps his greatest "black" film, was also set in a remote period.) The Swedish critic Rune Waldekranz has written that Smiles of a Summer Night "wears the costume of the fin de si�cle period for visual emphasis of the erotic comedy's fundamental premise -- that the step between the sublime and the ridiculous in love is a short one, but nevertheless one that a lot of people stub their toe on. Although suffering from several ingenuous slapstick situations, Smiles of a Summer Night is a comedy in the most important meaning of the word. It is an arabesque on an essentially tragic theme, that of man's insufficiency, at the same time as it wittily illustrates the belief expressed fifty years ago by Hjalmar Sšderberg that the only absolutes in life are 'the desire of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul.' "
-- PAULINE KAEL

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