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

It's a long time since I've seen a Bergman film, and I certainly hadn't seen this, the film that led to him being an internationally renowned film director. It's far from the normal film that some would describe as 'Bergmanesque': bleak, full of existential angst, suicidal thoughts, etc. This film though may treat the same subjects but in a comical way, and it is, after all, described in the title as a romantic comedy ('romantisk comedi'), even if it's unmistakably Bergman.

This is a fin-de-siècle tale starring the middle-aged lawyer Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand), married for two years to the nineteen-year-old Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), who's still a virgin but who tells him she's working on not being: let's face it, these things take time, especially with the upper middle class, and the family servant Petra (Harriet Andersson) tells her she lost her virginity at sixteen; and Petra seems to have a mature but teasing way of dealing with Fredrik's sex-starved son (by his first wife) Henrik (Björn Bjelfvenstam).

Between wives, Fredrik had an affair with actress Desirée (Eva Dahlbeck), who is now (boringly) in an affair with Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle), who is married to Charlotte (Margit Carlqvist), a friend of Anne's. Things start to come to a head when everyone is invited (with some plotting) to the home of Désirée's mother for a Midsommar bash, and Henrik throws a real funny and starts getting suicidal during dinner.

But as most of the planet apart from me must have seen this film, let's cut to the quick and I'll say what I found so funny about it before and after the dinner. Petra's prick-teasing of Henrik is obvious, but what of Fredrik secretly visiting Désirée and (after falling in a huge puddle, being thrown out by Malcolm: holding his own still wet clothes and in borrowed underwear? There are many funny, almost slapstick gags (yes, this is Bergman) but surely the best must be Henrik's failure to hang himself? That's not even black humour, it's just comical: his neck-strap slips off its hook, he falls to the wall and in so doing presses a button which releases a concealed bed on which his beloved is sleeping. But here's the killer: perhaps in recognition of Henrik's excitement on seeing Anne, and/or perhaps in recognition of unintended auto-erotic asphyxiation, a cupid-like/angelic sculpture above the static headboard raises a looong bugle as if in erection.

OK, I forgot to mention Fredrik being challenged to Russian roulette, Malcolm losing and instead of receiving a bullet in the face gets a heap of soot, but that's a minor issue: this is a whale of a laugh from Bergman, and I never thought I'd live to say that.