The inspiration for Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Steven Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, Bergman’s Smiles is an erotic, nostalgic jab at upper-class sexual repression and marital dysfunction. At a turn-of-the-century country estate, eight men and women—invited for a summer weekend—embark on frenzied rounds of sexual intrigue and deception as they variously pair off, break up, and exchange partners. Inspired by Mozart, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Renoir’s Rules of the Game, Bergman’s light-hearted but sophisticated boudoir farce, featuring such Swedish screen legends as Gunnar Björnstrand and Harriet Andersson, remains one of cinema’s great erotic comedies. In Swedish with English subtitles.
Appears in: Ingmar Bergman: A Centenary Celebration
Genres: Comedy
Other Films by Ingmar Bergman
Summer with Monika
Originally regarded as an erotic exploitation film, Monika enjoyed reappraisal as Bergman gained international recognition. Here he first articulates his recognizable psychological affinity with the ocean shore in a story of naïve desire and doomed romance. Shy, bourgeois Harry (Lars Ekborg) and the sultry, restless Monika (Harriet Andersson), escape their dreary lives in Stockholm and …
The Virgin Spring
Bergman returns to the medieval Sweden of The Seventh Seal with this decidedly modern parable based on a 14th-century religious folk tale pitting Christian revenge against pagan magic. Töre (Max Von Sydow), a devoted father, leads a quiet, dignified family life. His love for his daughter Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) is affectionate but overbearing, and his …
Autumn Sonata
Bergman’s only collaboration with Swedish film legend Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata serves as a complimentary, yet more melancholy parallel to Wild Strawberries. Charlotte (Bergman), a professional musician, examines her life from the contemplative perch of old age. After having watched a lover die, she is reunited with her neglected and estranged daughter. Eva (Liv Ullmann) …
Shame
Musicians Jan (Max Von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann), take refuge in a remote farmhouse hoping to escape the coming horrors of a civil war. There they face Bergman’s classic themes of personal isolation and fatalism, set in the context of political violence. Shame finds the director trying to make sense of postwar Europe in …
Sawdust and Tinsel
“Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival in one of the late master’s most vivid early works. The story of the charged relationship between an aging, turn-of-the-century traveling circus owner (Åke Grönberg) and the humiliation he suffers at the hand of his young performer girlfriend (Harriet Andersson) and her lover, …