This movie features shallow characters, mildly amusing shtick, and early 1980s New York acting school pseudo-intellectuals placed back in 1900 for a weak parody of Bergman's "Smiles of Summer Night. " The title, score, and some silly supernatural effects suggest fairies or spirits to add a nod to Shakespeare, but the themes that both Shakespeare and Bergman delineate in their wonderful works are not even remotely touched on by Allen, who turns the magic of sex and love and its attendant pain into...shtick. Allen once admitted that in his lifetime he would never make a film as good as any film Bergman made; at least he knew his limitations. Allen was a comedian working in a post sexual revolution era where sex had to be covered up by jokes and special effects, the way it's been for any mainstream American movie of the past 35 years. This parody of Bergman thinly disguises a love of Bergman, and only serves to highlight the glaring differences in scope between Bergman's film and Allen's film. It follows in a Hollywood and vaudeville comic tradition of mocking the highbrow for the benefit of middlebrow tastes, but is not irreverent or incisive enough to produce real laughs. This may be partly because it's so one-sided, with all of the fantasies and neuroses coming from a male consciousness, whereas Bergman and Shakespeare (not to mention the great farce writers, such as Feydeau), always gave men and women equal representation.
Review of A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
