At work he receives theatre tickets from his assistant to attend and watch the great actress Desiree Armfeldt perform, a woman who was once his former mistress. I believe Smiles of a Summer Night was a way for Bergman to cast out his demons of his extreme feelings of guilt, selfishness and anger towards himself and the male sex altogether, as he repeatedly returned to the themes of infidelity in his later films, most harshly in his painful and excruciating drama Scenes From a Marriage.įredrik Egerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is a middle-aged lawyer married to a 19-year-old beauty named Anne. He was known to have public relationships during his marriages with several of the actresses in his films like Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann and Harriet Andersson. Scramble them and then solve the equation." And soon enough this mathematical game of love begins, as the film will bring upon such things as manipulation, deception, flirtation, humiliation, lustful temptations, Russian Roulette and a trick bed that comes out through a secret trap door within a wall with a cherub on top of a bed that trumpets a tune. No artist for this story could be better to direct this film than Ingmar Bergman who was himself married five times, and not faithfully.
Bergman thought when first writing the story, "It was a challenge to write a comedy with a mathematical relationship: man-woman, man-woman.four pairs. Smiles of a Summer Night is set in Sweden during the late 19th century, where an actress decides to invite to her mother's country house party two married men, who have both been recent lovers of hers and invite both of their wives. So I said, 'Why not make a film just for fun?' I went away to Switzerland and had two alternatives: Write Smiles of a Summer Night or kill myself." So during an extremely deep depression Bergman developed a dark, sexy, witty comedy that involved such snappy and fast-paced dialogue, that could be greatly compared to the American screwball classics of the 1930's. He even said to a group of students at the Southern Methodist University, "This was a terrible time in my life, and I was extremely depressed. Ingmar Bergman came up with only one option: write a comedy. Two of his films just bombed at the box office and the head of the production company threatened his future if he every made another drama again. Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman's witty sex comedy, came at a time in which Bergman's marriage, and love affair was deteriorating, and he was extremely miserable. Infidelity was one of the many bleak themes that Swedish director Ingmar Bergman dwelled on within his films and his early film Smiles of a Summer Night is one that greatly emphasizes that.
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