Film Review
It was inevitable that, in the process of his maturation as a writer and
filmmaker, Woody Allen would progress beyond the flippant comedies of his
early years and gradually work a more serious dimension into his art.
This middle phase of Allen's career brought us some of the director's best
films -
Annie Hall (1977),
Manhattan (1979) and
Hannah and Her Sisters
(1986) - but there were also a fair number of failures and near-misses.
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is one of the less worthy of Woody
Allen's films in this inspired and varied period, a film that continues to
divide opinion in spite of its obvious charms and the presence of Mia Farrow
in the first of the 13 films she made with Allen.
Ingmar Bergman's
Smiles
of a Summer Night (1955) was the chief inspiration for the film,
although other influences are not too hard to detect, from William Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream to Jean Renoir's
Parte de campagne (1936)
and
La Règle du jeu (1939).
Allen tones down his brash comedy style so that his waspish wisecracking
humour and comedic hijinks attain a homopathic level of dilution, and the
result is a good-natured but mostly humourless chamberpiece that would
more easily fit into Anton Chekhov's oeuvre than Woody Allen's. Whether
it's because of the stiff-shirt period setting or the Bergman association,
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is among the tamest of Allen's sex
comedies, one that you could safely show to your grandmother without blushing
or furnishing her with a dictionary.
To be fair, there is the odd excursion into that familiar stratum of Allen
lunacy that we have come to know and love, most involving Allen strapped
to an implausible flying contraption that is bound to come crashing out of
the sky at some point. But for the most part, however, the film resembles
an upmarket French rom-com of the 1980s, with six sexually frustrated characters
spending far more time talking about their pent-up desires than actually
acting upon them. If Allen were French (the mind boggles at the thought),
this is probably the kind of film he would have made all the time - so we
should perhaps be grateful for small mercies. What makes
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy tolerable, indeed enjoyable to a certain
extent, is that it is a one-off, Allen's attempt to charter new territory
as he set about taming his erstwhile penchant for ungainly silliness.
The film has a least two redeeming virtues - it is beautifully photographed
and features a talented cast, with Allen for once happy to play as part of an
ensemble rather than take the lead. José Ferrer (best known
for his stage and screen portrayals of Cyrano de Bergerac) gives most value
as the pompous intellectual who (like Allen) appears to be an irresistible
magnet for the finest examples of female pulchritude. Ferrer may not
get the best lines, but he makes the most of what he is given and outclasses
both of his male co-stars, so that poor Tony Roberts comes across as a second
rate Don Juan fighting a losing battle in the charisma stakes against a typically
neurotic Allen. The three female protagonists are pretty interchangeable,
with little to distinguish them other than their coiffure. Mia Farrow
is the image of pre-Raphaelite loveliness and you half expect her to meet
a tragic end in a stream, à la Millais's famous painting
Ophelia.
In fact, she comes close to doing just that, thanks to one of Allen's less
successful aeronautical ventures. Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty
might as well have been clones - one of the script's main failings is its
inability to make either character believable or distinguishable. It
is to the film's detriment that the female characters all appear as little
more than two-dimensional objects in a male wish fulfilment fantasy, whilst
the male characters are overwhelming slaves to their over-developed libido
- they might just as well have been portrayed as walking phalluses.
Glib lines such as "Marriage is the death of hope" and "Sex alleviates tension
and love causes it" lack the punch and wisdom that leap from the page of
any anthology of Woody Allen quotes, but the film's biggest let-down is the
absence of a strong central idea to drive the slow and repetitive narrative.
Waffly allusions to the supernatural look like a half-hearted attempt to
inject some poetic substance into the lacklustre storyline but these ultimately
fall flat and rob the film of anything approaching a satisfying conclusion.
The gorgeous photography (with exterior shots clearly modelled on
French impressionistic paintings of the 19th century)
is a poor substitute for content but this at least
helps to make up for the below-par script and chronic lack of decent gags,
particularly when accompanied with the divine music of Felix Mendelssohn.
Compared with the great Bergman film that inspired it,
A Midsummer Night's
Sex Comedy is pretty inconsequential, but, helped by its impressive production
values and all-too infrequent lapses into side-splitting farce, it is far
from being Allen's worst film.
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Woody Allen film:
Zelig (1983)
Film Synopsis
New York, circa 1900. On the eve of their wedding, esteemed philosopher
Leopold and his bride-to-be Ariel accept an invitation to spend a weekend
at the country home of Andrew, a Wall Street stockbroker and part-time inventor.
Andrew's conjugal relations with his wife Adrian are fraught at present and
are not helped by the fact that Andrew and Ariel once shared a mutual attraction
which they failed to act upon. The party is joined by another couple
- the over-sexed Dr Maxwell and his latest conquest, the sexually liberated
nurse Dulcy. It isn't long before Andrew and Maxwell are fighting over
Ariel, whom they both desire with a passion bordering on the reckless. Meanwhile,
keen to make the best use of his last hours of bachelorhood, Leopold makes
his move on Dulcy...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.