A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

At the turn of the twentieth century, three couples gather at a country house for a weekend. Andrew is an inventor whose marriage has cooled; Leopold is an elderly professor about to marry a much younger woman; Maxwell is a doctor who falls in love with every woman he meets. Over one night everyone ends up somewhere with the wrong person. The subject is not infidelity but the timing of desire. Everyone meets the right person at the wrong moment, and by the end nobody gets what they wanted, which is not presented as a punishment. The form is pastoral: green meadows, a lake, a gramophone. The cinematographer is Gordon Willis and the outdoor scenes are composed as if out of American painting. The narrative looks openly at Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, and the music is taken from Mendelssohn. This is the first film Woody Allen and Mia Farrow made together; the two would go on working together nearly every year for more than a decade. Allen prepared it alongside Zelig in the same period. José Ferrer plays the professor, with Tony Roberts and Julie Hagerty as the other couple. Who it is for: viewers who like lighter Allen and period comedy. Who it is not for: anyone wanting density; the film is short, light and counted among his least ambitious.