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Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

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From Time Out Film Guide

Bergman's first major success, inspiration for both Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, this enchanting comedy of manners assembles a team of couples, ex-couples and would-be couples, and puts them through their paces in a game of love at a country house party during one heady midsummer weekend in 1900. Ruthless towards its characters' amorous pretensions, but extending a kind of ironic tenderness when they get hoist with their own petards, it is a wonderfully funny, genuinely erotic, and quite superbly acted rondo of love. Dig too deeply and it disintegrates, but its facade - decked out in elegant turn-of-the-century settings and costumes - has a magical, shimmering beauty.

Author: TM 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

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Cast & crew

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ulla Jacobsson, Harriet Andersson, Margit Carlqvist, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jarl Kulle, Ake Fridell, Björn Bjelvenstam, Naima Wifstrand, Bibi Andersson full cast

Genre(s): Comedy

Duration: 110 mins

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