
Like Stanley Kubrick will later do, Bergman seems to suggest that much of society - with its rituals, rules and highly wrought codes of manners - is essentially sterile, mostly devoid of life and vigor. These rituals, instead of facilitating human enjoyment only seem to frustrate it. Smiles of a Summer Night, however, is not nearly as fatalist or as nihilistic as Kubrick's films. Bergman's bourgeoisie drift about, plagued by doubt and regret, seemingly content and yet haunted by past infatuations (like the character of Fredrik Egerman), they plot and scheme in order to get their own way (like Desiree Armfeldt and the Countess Malcolm), they are tormented by the strict morality imposed upon them by society and religion (like Fredrik's son, Henrik). It is the lower classes, the maids and the butlers who, like in so many Shakespearean plays, manifest a careless bawdiness and an innocent carnality, who live outside the strictures of polite society, who give themselves over to warm sensual pleasures, it is these who get any sort of enjoyment and fulfillment from life and yet even this enjoyment is coloured by a slightly melancholy tint of realism, by the awareness that life and love are rarely perfect and so one might as well make the best of it.
The internal conflict between the rituals of society and the desires of the flesh is vividly encapsulated in the character of Henrik, Fredrik's conflicted son who cannot find peace in the strict religious life he has chosen for himself. In one scene, Henrik, vexed by his own self- and church-imposed virtue, prepares to commit suicide while from a window he enviously watches the uninhibited Petra the Maid and Frid the Groom flirt, giggle and dance. Henrik, in spite of himself and his rigid sense of morality, is in love his his father's young virgin wife Anne (whom Fredrik, still in love with a former mistress, has not yet made love to). At the moment of despair and suicide, however, Henrik is saved by a chance turn of events that leads him, not only to a personal revelation, but also into the arms of Anne, who, young and eager and sexually ignored by her husband, has apparently been in love with him all the time. Mutually disregarding social convention, the new young lovers elope, leaving Fredrik not so much angry at the betrayal as simply bewildered that he has misunderstood love for so long (a betrayal, it is probably important to note, that goes against law and not flesh, since the marriage of Anne and Fredrik had never been consummated).
But perhaps the quintessential scene from Smiles of a Summer Night is the final one, in which Petra, while literally rolling in the hay, playfully forces Frid to swear that he will marry her. "Swear by everything you hold sacred," she demands, to which Frid happily replies, "I swear by my manhood!" Bergman, at least on this film, seems to have settled on lusty, rustic, full-bodied sensuality as the ideal pleasure in life. Here, on the outskirts of society, sex and love and playfulness combine to create a warm, earthy ideal in which men and women, without the pretense of ritual and convention, simply enjoy one another. I don't think that Bergman is saying high society needs to get off its high horse and play in the dirt; I think that he may be saying that the dirt isn't really all that dirty and should be raised up too.

experto crede: a strong recommendation, especially for those looking for comedy or romance with a slightly philosophical bent
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