Before the Knight played chess with Death, before God's silences became deafening, and before faces merged into a single, enigmatic psychic mask in Persona, Ingmar Bergman smiled. Or rather, he made the world smile. A bitter smile, of course, imbued with that Swedish melancholy that is almost a trademark, but still a smile. Smiles of a Summer Night is the most deceptively light-hearted gateway to Bergman's universe, a music box of desires and petty revenge whose seemingly frivolous melody foreshadows the existential dissonances that would define his future work. Seen today, the film is not only a masterpiece of sophisticated comedy, but a true poetic manifesto: proof that the most elegant farce can contain the deepest truths about the tragicomedy of human existence.

The structure is that of a theatrical clockwork mechanism, a chamber vaudeville that would have been the envy of Feydeau or the joy of Marivaux. On a Swedish country estate at the turn of the century, a tangle of couples (current, past, desired, and improbable) converge for a weekend under the enchanted and perpetual light of the summer solstice. There is the middle-aged lawyer Fredrik Egerman, married to the virgin and childish Anne; his son Henrik, a seminarian tormented by lust and love for his stepmother; the actress Désirée Armfeldt, Fredrik's former lover and current lover of the pompous Count Magnus; and finally the maid Petra, the embodiment of pragmatic and joyful carnality. This microcosm, sealed in an aristocratic bubble, becomes the stage for a war of the sexes fought not with swords but with razor-sharp jokes and glances laden with innuendo. The echo of Renoir's The Rules of the Game is palpable: here too, the hunt and the masked ball are replaced by a dinner and a sleepless night, but the function is the same. Social masks melt away, hierarchies are overturned, and primordial instincts emerge, chaotic and liberating, beneath a veneer of impeccable bourgeois etiquette.

Yet to reduce Smiles of a Summer Night to a simple homage to French cinema or comedy of misunderstandings would be a huge mistake. Bergman's touch is unique, an amalgam of Nordic cynicism and unexpected tenderness. If Ernst Lubitsch taught Hollywood how to allude to adultery with the closing of a door, Bergman orchestrates a symphony of sexual and emotional frustrations so explicit in their unspoken nature that they are almost deafening. His is not a comedy of situations, but of moods. Each character is a prisoner of an age of life and an idea of love. Fredrik longs for the youth that is slipping away from him, projecting it onto his child-wife Anne; Anne fears maturity and the sexuality that comes with it; Henrik pines away in romantic and self-destructive idealism; Désirée, perhaps the only one with true awareness, observes the carousel with the amused weariness of someone who has already played all the parts. In this, the film is closer to Schnitzler's Girotondo than to a Hollywood comedy: a circular ballet of desires that rarely meet in the right way and at the right time.

Bergman's genius lies in having transfigured this potentially tragic material through the filter of myth and magic. The summer night of the title is not just a temporal indication, but a real supernatural agent, a pagan force that undermines Christian and bourgeois conventions. Désirée's old mother, a sort of guardian deity of the estate, enunciates the prophecy that governs the film: the summer night will smile three times. The first smile is for young lovers, the second for madmen and jesters, and the third, the most melancholic, for the sad and defeated. This almost fairy-tale structure elevates the narrative, abstracting it from realism and projecting it into an archetypal dimension. It is no coincidence that the most fitting parallel is Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Swedish estate becomes the forest of Athens, a liminal place where the laws of the city are suspended and a love potion (here in the form of a “magic” wine) shuffles the cards, revealing the truths hidden in the hearts of the protagonists. The couples swap partners, chase each other, lose each other and find each other again, not because of the intervention of a mischievous Puck, but because of the irresistible gravity of their own repressed desires.

It is impossible not to be struck by the aesthetic precision with which Bergman and his trusted director of photography, Gunnar Fischer, brought this vision to life. The interiors are opulent, almost suffocating, full of mirrors that reflect and multiply the fragmented identities of the characters. But it is outside, in the twilight and milky light that never dies, that the film finds its visual soul. Fischer paints a landscape that is both real and dreamlike, a place where nature itself seems complicit in human follies. The photography does not merely illuminate the scene, but becomes an integral part of it, suggesting an atmosphere of enchantment and temporal suspension. This visual mastery, combined with the perfection of the dialogue—a distillation of wit, aphorisms, and whispered confessions—creates an immersive and total experience.

Behind this formal perfection lies a production anecdote that adds to its value. In the mid-1950s, Bergman was considered a talented but commercially unreliable director. Smiles of a Summer Night was his last chance, a low-budget project that Svensk Filmindustri granted him almost with resignation. The triumph was total and unexpected. The film not only saved his career, but propelled him onto the international scene, winning the “Prix de l'humour poétique” at the Cannes Film Festival and becoming his first work to receive widespread distribution in the United States. It was this success that gave him the creative freedom and the means to make The Seventh Seal the following year. One could almost venture a meta-textual hypothesis: Bergman, like his characters, needed a night of lightness and magic in order to face his darkest demons.

The film's legacy is vast and profound. It directly inspired Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical A Little Night Music and, even more obviously, Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, which follows its plot and atmosphere with almost philological devotion. But its influence goes beyond individual tributes. Smiles of a Summer Night showed that comedy could be a vehicle for philosophical inquiry, that laughter could spring not from gags but from the painful awareness of our contradictions. It taught an entire generation of filmmakers that depth does not necessarily require solemnity.

Revisiting it today means rediscovering a Bergman who plays with forms and expectations, a divine puppeteer who pulls the strings of his characters with affectionate cruelty. The Russian roulette scene, a theatrical bluff orchestrated by Count Magnus, is emblematic: a fake tragedy that serves to unmask the true comedy of male vanities. The film is a waltz danced on the edge of an existential abyss, with the grace of those who know that life is an absurd game, and the only winning strategy is to accept one's own ridiculous, wonderful humanity. In the end, the night smiles on everyone: those who find new love, those who are content with a carnal adventure, and even those who, like Fredrik and Désirée, accept their defeat with the elegant resignation of those who have loved and lived enough to know that not all battles can be won. And in that bittersweet smile lies all the heartbreaking beauty of Ingmar Bergman's cinema.