A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)

Such a frustrating disappointment

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

This movie makes me happy. The humor seems not at all forced as I feel it sometimes is in Woody Allen movies. The battles of all the participants is fun to watch. It is set in the time of early Freud, and everyone displays their inner turmoils in various and entertaining ways.I have read several of viewer's reviews and I would recommend reading them. I will not do a synopsis nor a paraphrased review.I just watched this film's ending again and the slowly rising, bubbling "firefly" joyful ending is one that sends me from the viewing room out into real life with a renewed interest in things (aka "Stuff"). Movies are cool.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) was written and directed by Woody Allen. Allen also stars in his iconic role as a more-or-less decent guy with the ability to say or do the wrong thing in almost any situation. Woody has surrounded himself with talent in this film. Jose Ferrer plays the pompous professor Leopold, and Tony Roberts plays the "fast" doctor Maxwell, who is Allen's best friend. The real clout comes from the female actors: Mia Farrow is Ariel--engaged to Leopold, but maybe in love with Woody, or maybe even with Roberts. Julie Hagerty plays Dulcy, a young but not-so-innocent nurse who has accompanied Maxwell for the weekend. Mary Steenburgen portrays Allen's wife Adrian, who has become frigid for reasons that she knows but we don't.Shakespeare realized the potential of midsummer's night for fantasy and for love, and so did Ingmar Bergman in his film "Smiles of a Summer Night." Allen has never been afraid of taking on a challenge, and he maintains the tradition with a script where almost every man wants almost every woman, and vice-versa. The film is all about love, and all about sex. However, because it's rated PG-13, you know that there won't be any on-screen nudity. Actors talk about sex, they arrange secret meetings and talk about sex some more, but we never see them without multi-layered early-1900's clothing. That's OK--this movie is about the chase, not the consummation.The film contains some beautiful scenery, so it would work marginally better on a large screen, but it was certainly satisfactory on DVD. Incidentally, the soundtrack is composed entirely of music by Felix Mendelssohn. You may not realize that Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream contains a melody we hear all the time. You'll recognize it instantly.

Woody Allen can surprise every once in a while, and Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was a slight surprise. If I had heard more praise for it then I would've expected whatever, but it seemed to be one of his more "minor" works, something he wrote and directed very quickly in the midst of working on his big project Zelig. Expecting just a simple trifle, maybe along the lines of a Scoop or Manhattan Murder Mytsery, I got something more substantial. It draws upon sources of Bergman (Smiles of a Summer Night, making it Allen's only homage of Bergman that isn't dark and depressing), Shakespeare (for obvious reasons of the title, but also for the magical element), and maybe just something else that sprang out of Allen that I couldn't really tell.It's a comedy about mis-matched lovers, and how over the course of a day and night old wounds are opened, old flames come up, and lust is purged for better or worse. It's Woody Allen as an inventor with wife Mary Steenburgen inviting a philosophy professor (Jose Ferrer) and his to-be wife (Mia Farrow, first Allen movie and one of her best), who Allen's character Andrew used to date once, er twice, er three times. Then there's Julie Hagerty and Tony Robbins, good friends of the hosting couple, and with Robbins feeling some hardcore affection for Farrow, and the marriage between Allen and Steenburgen being in momentary peril (and Ferrer's "one last hurrah" ideal in Hagerty), it becomes like a twister game of affections and immense sexual stimulus.Whether or not this all makes sense is besides the point. Allen isn't out here so much for logic- how could he with laughable old self-flying machines and that weird magic box that springs out spirits into the night- as he is for personalities and using his effortless ear for dialog. Some of this is really funny, and even clever, like the sly joke with the bathtubs filling up with water (and Robbins/Farrow 'falling asleep', or with the near sex scene on top of the stove in the kitchen. So much of Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy tries to deny the whimsy of the setting, but by the end it becomes undeniable. Rarely has infidelity been this much fun, or with such good performances, in a film by this director, and it should be marked as one of his underrated (or maybe not widely seen) piecfes; for the nature montage early on alone, which is like the forest version of the opening of Manhattan, is worth viewing.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY was Woody Allen's amusing variation on the Ingmar Bergman classic SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, which had been previously re-worked as a Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim called A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. This film is about three couples in turn of the century who gather at one of their country homes for the weekend and it is clear at the beginning of the story that these three couples are hopelessly mismatched and we see the very human foibles that split up and mix up these three couples during this memorable weekend in the country. Woody and Mary Steenburgen plays the hosts for the weekend, a seemingly happily married couple whose happiness is clearly surface deep. Tony Roberts plays a womanizing physician and Woody's best pal who arrives for the weekend with his nurse (Julia Hagerty). In her first screen pairing with Woody Allen, Mia Farrow plays a former flame of Woody's who has arrived with her much older fiancée (Jose Ferrer) who she is scheduled to marry on Monday. Watching these three couples fuss and fumble all over each other in an attempt to be with the person they really want to be with is what makes this charming period comedy work. As always in Woody's films, music is crucial in setting the mood and Woody has chosen some classic Mendelsohhn pieces that set the perfect mood for the piece. The performances are uniformly fine, with Roberts a standout. Not one of Woody's better known films, but if you'd like to see where his relationship with Mia began, take a look.