Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy Blu-ray Movie Review

Send in the clones.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 28, 2015

In the early summer of 1973 one of the hottest tickets on Broadway was A Little Night Music, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musicalization of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, and in fact the show was typically oversold for the opening months of its run, not even having treasured SRO availabilities. Knowing I would be visiting New York to spend time with my uncles that June, I begged, pleaded and cajoled them to somehow get me a ticket to the show, which ended up being quite a little task, evidently requiring one of my uncles, who had backed a lot of straight plays and musicals through the years, to call in some kind of favor so that his noodge of a nephew could have his wish. The intellectualism of the musical most likely largely flew right over my head (I was still a pretty young kid), but the sensuous depiction of interlocking love stories cast an appropriate spell, despite a near miss between Boris Aronson’s plexiglas birch trees scenic design and lead actress Glynis Johns. It wasn’t until several years later in a college Film Theory class that I first saw Bergman’s source film and finally realized what a spectacularly brilliant job the musical had done of transporting the basic story into a new idiom. A somewhat less felicitous “adaptation” showed up some years later when Woody Allen decided to “remake” the iconic Bergman film, at least in a manner of speaking, as A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Allen of course had already begun to explore other Bergmanesque environments in some of his more dramatic offerings like Interiors, but here he exploited a more purely comic ambience, not always to fulsome effect. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is, like a lot of Allen’s oeuvre, probably too self-aware for its own good, and it presents Mia Farrow (in her first starring Allen entry) in a rather peculiar light at times, as if Allen weren’t quite sure yet how to properly use her distinctive charms.

Act One of A Little Night Music closes with the ebullient anthem “A Weekend in the Country”, as a coterie of couples make their plans to get away from it all—while probably suspecting they’re all marching directly into an emotional maelstrom. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy dispatches with a lot of the back story that makes up the opening of both Bergman’s film and its subsequent musicalization in order to get to that rural fete, instead offering quick vignettes that adequately outline the various relationships. Allen portrays fussy and neurotic (you expected anything else?) inventor Andrew, who is in a sexless marriage with Adrian (Mary Steenburgen). Andrew and Adrian are hosting two other couples for a midsummer gambol, including Adrian’s cousin, an officious philosopher, writer and all around bon vivant named Leopold (Jose Ferrer) and his much younger fiancée Ariel (Mia Farrow). Also on hand are womanizer Maxwell (Tony Roberts) and his latest conquest, a seemingly addlepated woman named Dulcy (Julie Hagerty).

The upcoming nuptials of Leopold and Ariel provide the supposed reason for the country festivities, but of course the get together is simply the McGuffin that allows a variety of characters to interact with each other in various ways. Allen divorces the characters from some of their Bergmanesque counterparts, and in fact completely eschews the whole angle of an elder’s children finding their own ways through the vagaries of love (and/or sex). Instead, there’s the fitful familial connection between Leopold and Adrian, which is soon coupled (no pun intended) with a long ago flirtation between Andrew and Ariel which finds new spark in this romantic setting. The good (?) doctor Maxwell and his squeeze seem mostly like appendages here, never really woven artfully into the overall scheme of things, but at least providing Allen with his typical Tony Roberts sounding board as various romantic escapades ensue.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy never quite finds its tonal feet. At times Allen seems to be aiming for knockabout farce, as evidenced by Andrew’s Caractacus Potts-like inventions which would have seemed more at home in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. At other times he seems to want to evince a knowing romantic comedy that is long on metaphysics but strangely short on actual sexual energy. The film careens kind of wildly, yet tamely, between a number of different tonal elements (and characters), never really settling down into anything secure and therefore being one of the auteur’s more hit or miss offerings.

The film is perhaps hobbled most by its casting of Farrow in the pivotal role of Ariel. Farrow is a kind of mousy presence in the best of times, and certainly not one most men would think of if asked to name a so-called “sex goddess,” and yet she’s consigned to a part where she supposedly radiates such erotic energy that Andrew is almost instantly distracted beyond measure. The film ends up being almost too polite in this regard, unwilling or perhaps afraid to go to a place where the unpredictable forces that motivate sexual desire are really explored with any meaningful humor or insight.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Culled from the MGM archives (by way of Orion), this has the typical look of a lot of MGM masters recently, with a decently organic appearance but a somewhat soft overall ambience that is probably only exaggerated by the dewy, gauzy cinematography of the iconic Gordon Willis. While colors look generally accurate, saturation is just a bit on the anemic side, though some of the brightly lit outdoor scenes (and there are a lot of them) pop quite nicely, with some convincingly vivid blue skies and lush green foliage on display. The softness tends to slightly mask detail in midrange shots, though close- ups can still offer good amounts of fine detail. As the story gets into dusk and, finally, night, there are some recurrent issues with inadequate shadow detail. Opening credits display a fair amount of wobble, but otherwise image stability is fine. A couple of late opticals reveal the expected upticks in grain and softness.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy features a fine if unremarkable sounding DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track, one which adequately supports the film's dialogue and Mendelssohn inflected score. Some of the bigger cues like the brassy "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night's Dream sound nicely forceful despite the narrow setting. Fidelity is fine, though dynamic range finds most of its peaks and valleys in the score offerings.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original Theatrical Trailer (480p; 1:19)


• MGM 90th Anniversary Trailer (1080p; 2:06)


• Isolated Score Track is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy has some flitting moments of good humor, but it's a strangely languid depiction of the titanic subject of sex. The best performances are by Ferrer and (perhaps unexpectedly) Hagerty, but a lot of the rest of the cast doesn't seem to know what to make of their characters. The film is certainly one of Allen's most gorgeous from a cinematography standpoint, and that aspect may be the film's most enduring selling point. With caveats noted, and with an emphasis on Willis' lovely work, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy comes Recommended.