THE CULMINATION OF BERGMAN’S WORK THROUGH THE 1940S AND EARLY ’50S, SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT DEMONSTRATED THE DIRECTOR’S FLAIR FOR SOCIAL COMEDY AND BROUGHT HIM INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM.
On the surface, it’s a charming comedy of manners about four men and four women who, during a single night at a country house at the end of the 19th century, display their interests and affections in a mood of cultivated merriment. The tone is unstintingly hedonistic, and the dialogue is filled with licentiousness. Yet this Rabelaisian humour is never gratuitous. The complex interaction of the characters makes the film a continually shifting kaleidoscope in which different relationships and attitudes to love become juxtaposed, to be compared and evaluated. Beneath the bubbly surface and behind the sensuous light of the Swedish summer, the illusions and pretensions of the bourgeois characters are sharply exposed.