Woody Allen (1982)
Few people think it’s one of Woody Allen’s best but I liked A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy thirty years ago and I like it now. The inspiration is evidently (as well as Shakespeare!) Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night – this is a farce in a period setting (the first decade of the twentieth century) and all the action is concentrated within a few hours. The movie is different from most of Woody Allen’s work in other respects too: it has a country rather than an urban setting and there’s Mendelssohn on the soundtrack (which also serves to connect the piece with the magical Max Reinhardt screen version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). It’s a pity that the BFI had such a lousy print (they apologised) that it was hard to appreciate the grading of light and the enchanted darkness in Gordon Willis’s cinematography.
The people in the story swap sexual partners and Woody Allen shifts his usual identity. His character Andrew works on Wall Street; when he’s not at the office, he’s a crackpot inventor, trying to find ways to fly and so on: his latest invention, a ‘spirit ball’ that communicates with the next world, is pivotal to the plot. Andrew and his wife Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) are hosting a weekend visit from her cousin Leopold (Jose Ferrer) and his decades-younger fiancée Ariel (Mia Farrow). (The spirit ball is ridiculed by Leopold, a philosophy professor and a rigorous rationalist.) The other house guests are Andrew’s friend Max (Tony Roberts), a randy doctor, and his latest girlfriend of a few hours, a nurse called Dulcy (Julie Hagerty). For the most part, the characters’ speech rhythms are comically ahead of their time – they sound to be long post-Freudian New Yorkers – although Jose Ferrer’s readings are so dexterous that he’s persuasive both as a creature of the era in which the film is set and as a contemporary of the others. With the exception of Tony Roberts, all the performers look in period – including (thanks to the specs he wears here and the way his hair’s done) Woody Allen himself. The gathering of the party is leisurely and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy preliminary for a little too long. The shots of local animal, bird and insect life in the countryside around feel like padding but every organism seems to be preparing to have it off and, once the humans’ sex drives get a grip, the film’s action is pleasingly swift.
Jose Ferrer is outstanding as the pompous, super-cultured Leopold who turns out to be at least as lecherous as the next man and who gets his sceptic’s comeuppance in the climax to the film. Ferrer’s acting has much more depth than anyone else’s – his controlled wit also makes him the funniest performer in the cast, though Woody Allen runs him a good second. The character of Max is much thinner and not that different from other roles Tony Roberts has played in Allen movies but Roberts is able and likeable. Mia Farrow, Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty are physically distinct enough but their voices tend to blur when the camera is at some distance away (a problem made worse by the loss of visual tonal distinction in this particular print). All six of the actors are splendid, though, in ensemble scenes like the rhythmical outdoor dinner table sequence. It comes as a surprise, for a Woody Allen film, that, once Adrian has got rid of her sexual block, it’s implied that her and Andrew’s marriage is going to be plain sailing. It’s a surprise too for Woody Allen to allow there to be a spirit world – but, when we see the ghosts in the final sequence, it’s clearly a world in which the sexual impress of human life still holds sway.
8 January 2012
