Film rated 12A by the MPA.
This review contains spoilers.

As summer approaches, we tend to imagine warmth, vibrancy, and a certain ease of living — a season when desire feels natural, and life seems to loosen its grip on restraint. Yet summer’s brightness often casts shadows of its own. This month, I turn to a film that uses the idea of summertime not as a backdrop of carefree pleasure, but as a stage on which the tensions of romance, class, and gender quietly unfold: Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), the work that first brought him to Cannes acclaim.

One might expect a 1950s film set in high summer to revel in Technicolour’s lush palette. Instead, Bergman chooses black and white, stripping the season of its expected visual abundance. This absence is not a limitation but a strategy. Rather than relying on colour to evoke summer’s sensuality, Bergman constructs the season through genre conventions and the volatile dynamics between lovers, spouses, and rivals. In doing so, he reveals that summertime — often idealised as a period of freedom and passion — can also expose the social structures that shape who is allowed to love, desire, or choose at all.

A seemingly simple romantic comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night offers a study of sexual politics. The film is inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and by a range of Marivaux’s comedies, which are famous for their exploration of courtship. (Smiles of a Summer Night) This lineage matters because Shakespeare and Marivaux used romantic entanglements to critique social order. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theme of “jealousy and unreason” structures the chaos of the summer night — a theme the film deliberately inherits. Through the direct thematic reference, the film constructs a summer world in which desire reveals a power struggle embedded in patriarchal romances.

The film depicts four pairs of relationships that are intrinsically linked through family, friendships and love affairs - a classic combination for gendered violence to take place. We are introduced to the traditionally married couple, the affair, the spontaneous couple, and the forbidden love through the lens of the protagonist, Frederik Egerman. Fredrik Egerman is a middle-aged lawyer facing marital problems with his second wife, Anne, who is nineteen years of age. Two years into this marriage, the pair has yet to consummate. One night, he decided to take Anne to see the play that Desiree is starring in, and after the performance, he sought Desiree, his former mistress, for relationship advice. The lawyer, the guardian of rules that built and regulated society, is at the mercy of existing conflicts between love and family in early 20th-century society.

Although we are introduced to the narrative sphere through Frederik Egerman, the film gives more attention to the female characters. Much of the comedy stems from the wives’ and mistresses’ very valid jealousy and anger towards their male counterparts. For instance, Charlotte, Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm’s wife, is discontented with her husband’s affair with Desiree. So, Charlotte and Desiree became allies at the summertime dinner party that Desiree threw to make the man jealous. Here, Count Malcolm and Frederik serve as reactionary characters, almost secondary to their wives and the mistress, even though they hold patriarchal power. It seems to me that the second half of the film is a choreography of women taking agency within their restricted domestic settings. Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm and Charlotte’s reunion at the end is not a union of love, but a result of manipulation. Their relationship is one-sided and Count Malcolm only gains interest in Charlotte because she wagered that she could seduce Egerman in less than 15 minutes, which induced his jealousy towards Frederik Egerman. Charlotte intelligently secures the Count’s loyalty in their marriage by attacking his ego, perfectly echoing Desiree’s earlier expression that “sensible adults often treat love as if it were a military campaign or gymnastics.”

Frid, the servant introduced last in the film, says to Petra, “Do you see, little one, the summer night is smiling… The summer night has three smiles. This is the first one, from midnight to dawn, when young lovers open their hearts and loins. Look there, on the horizon, is a smile so soft you have to be very quiet and watchful to see it at all.” He is referring to Anne and Henrik, who quietly announced their elopement moments later. The first smile of the summer night emerges from a place of genuine love - one that breaks free from social restraints. However, the eloped couple literally escaping the nuclear family structure is something only those two can afford because they come from wealthy backgrounds. If gender shapes who may desire, class determines who may act on that desire.

Anne Egerman was thrown into a marriage when she was barely of age. She was handed social security that comes with marriage and the nuclear family. What makes her social security torturous is that she is secretly in love with her stepson, Henrik, who is also hopelessly in love with her and distracts himself from this intense emotion by engaging in an affair with a household servant, Petra. The family structure is the obstacle to their pursuit of love. McClintock analysed,

“the family offered an indispensable figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests. Since the subordination of woman to man, and child to adult, was deemed a natural fact, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature. The family image was thus drawn on to figure hierarchy within unity as an 'organic' element of historical progress, and thereby became indispensable for legitimizing exclusion and hierarchy within non-familial (affiliative) social form…” (McClintock, 64)

In other words, the “family” instates a social hierarchy that appears natural and in which case oppresses humans’ primal desire for passion. The only exception to this phenomenon is when the individuals involved both come from economic and social wealth. Hence, romance opens its doors only to the privileged.

After Petra and Frid get engaged, Petra yells, “the summer night smiled its third smile!” The couple run across the field, getting back to their work with a renewed status rather than with the lawyer who was the centre of all confusion. “Marriage also serves as the conclusion towards which traditional comic narrative inevitably moves, a cultural symbol of the harmonious symmetry and the resolution of troubles.” (Stott, 72). Rather than a harmonious conclusion, setting grounds for women’s sexual liberation, I find it an unsatisfying ending that critiques precisely the lack of liberation women had within social constructs. Petra has been free to explore her sexuality because, as a servant, society does not strictly expect her to be “decent”. But in the end, she still chooses to secure an engagement with a man of her same class - that is the reality of love for many women. Women were dependent on their husbands (for social security, as one could imagine), and it is disguised as a culture of desiring love. As Frid says, “We invoke love, call it, beg for it, cry for it, try to mimic it… We think that we own it, we lie about it. But we don’t have it… We are denied the love of loving.” Summer is the season of passion and love; it is also a rose-tinted facade reminding us of the social structures that outlast the season.