Smiles of a Summer Night

One of the cinema’s great erotic comedies, Smiles of a Summer Night features a plot that is an Ophulsian ronde of love affairs and intrigues revolving around a middle-aged lawyer (Gunnar Björnstrand); his young wife, who remains a virgin; his former mistress, a sophisticated stage actress (Eva Dahlbeck); her lover; and his wife. They gather for a weekend at the country estate of the actress’s elderly mother. A true parody of the ridiculous male, this is a comic working-out of an idea suggested so tragically in Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel—that men are a species of beast who turn to women to save them from being totally humiliated.