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Critical Film Analysis of Smiles of a Summer Night

Uploaded by spootyhead on Apr 18, 2007

Critical Film Analysis of Smiles of a Summer Night

Smiles of a Summer Night is the story of a series of amorous adventures undertaken by various people, set in Sweden at the turn of the century. Done by Bergman, it is a scintillating, charmingly sensual romantic comedy. The film deals with the problems between several couples as they move in different and rather unpredictable stages during their erotic games. The setting is a country house party in the midsummer of 1900.

It is very surprising, but in Smiles of a Summer Night women are the dominant figures, they have much better roles than men, much more complex. Here is a brief description of the characters. The lead character is a lawyer named Fredrik Egerman. He is married to Anne, a woman young enough to be his daughter, and has for several reasons not yet slept with her. She, meanwhile, is jealous of his past relationship with the actress Desiree Armfeldt, who reappears in Frederic’s life to perhaps resume that relationship. Meanwhile we have Frederic’s grown son, Henrik, who hankers for the maid, Petra, and has his eyes on Anne, his stepmother, in secret. Throw in Desiree’s recent lover, Count Malcolm, and several other hilarious peripheral characters like Charlotte and Frid, give this movie a very nice touch of comedy, romance and I could say a little bit of drama.

Towards the end of the movie, while Frid and Petra are having their love adventure an interesting conversation comes out. They start talking about young lovers. Are they young lovers? Well, according to Frid’s description of young lovers, they are not. Frid implies that “there are only a very few young lovers on this earth” and that love has been denied to them. Frid and Petra are clowns, like Frid said: “we invoke love, call for it, beg for it, cry for it try to imitate it, think that we have it, lie about it”. When the summer night smiles it second smile they both recognize it. Frid says: “For the clowns, the fools, the unredeemable”. And Petra agrees: “Then she smiles for us”. I personally think that they are both the kind of people who just want to have fun, these are the typical prototype of people who are nothing more than love clowns.

If we talk about young lovers, I think that in the movie the only...

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Uploaded by:   spootyhead

Date:   04/18/2007

Category:   Film

Length:   2 pages (561 words)

Views:   4591

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