Film Overview
Six people spend a summer weekend together in the country and discover that desire is considerably less orderly than any of them would like to believe.
Set around the beginning of the twentieth century, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy takes place largely at the country home of Andrew and Adrian. Andrew is a Wall Street stockbroker whose real enthusiasm is inventing improbable machines, including a flying bicycle and a mysterious device intended to reveal another spiritual dimension.
Their guests are the distinguished philosopher Leopold and his much younger fiancée Ariel, together with Andrew’s doctor friend Maxwell and Maxwell’s latest companion, the free-spirited nurse Dulcy.
What begins as a civilised country gathering gradually becomes a complicated rearrangement of romantic and sexual attraction. Andrew has known Ariel before. His marriage to Adrian has lost its physical intimacy. Maxwell is immediately attracted to Ariel, while Adrian finds herself increasingly drawn towards Maxwell.
Woody Allen keeps the story almost entirely within this small group, allowing conversations, misunderstandings, jealousy and sudden desire to move the six characters into new combinations over the course of the weekend.
Gordon Willis photographs the countryside in warm colour, while the soundtrack draws heavily on Felix Mendelssohn. The result is one of the lightest and most pastoral films in Allen’s filmography.
My Review
A weekend where almost everybody falls for the wrong person
I have always liked A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy more than its relatively modest reputation might suggest. It is not trying to be another Annie Hall, Manhattan or Stardust Memories. Its ambitions are deliberately smaller, lighter and more playful.
That is part of its appeal.
After the emotional and formal intensity of the films immediately before it, Allen retreats to the countryside, assembles six people in and around one beautiful house and spends a summer weekend moving their affections around like pieces on a board.
Nobody is entirely happy with the person they arrived with.
Andrew loves Adrian but their physical relationship has faded. Adrian loves Andrew but no longer seems able to respond to him sexually. Leopold is preparing to marry Ariel while maintaining absolute faith in rational thought. Ariel, meanwhile, carries memories and desires that are considerably less orderly than the professor would probably like.
Maxwell appears with Dulcy but regards sexual fidelity as almost an intellectual misunderstanding. Dulcy seems perfectly comfortable with the idea that attraction can happen wherever it happens.
Put them together under a summer moon and civilisation begins to look surprisingly fragile.
Everyone arrives with a partner. By nightfall, almost everyone is wondering whether they came with the wrong one.
Andrew is one of Allen’s gentler screen characters. He still has the familiar nervousness and insecurity, but there is something unusually innocent about him.
He is a stockbroker by profession, yet his real excitement comes from inventions that seem to belong to a child’s idea of the future. His flying bicycle is the perfect example. It is impractical, improbable and completely charming.
Andrew seems to want the universe to contain more than ordinary life can explain.
His strange spirit ball is an even clearer expression of that desire. Leopold insists that existence can be understood rationally. Andrew suspects there may be invisible forces, spirits and energies around us that conventional thought cannot account for.
The disagreement never becomes particularly heavy. This is not Interiors or Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen is playing with ideas rather than building a philosophical argument.
Yet that little conflict between science and mystery runs quietly beneath the comedy.
Leopold believes in the mind. Andrew keeps finding evidence that the body and imagination have their own plans.
José Ferrer is ideal as Leopold because he brings such natural authority to the part. He sounds like a man accustomed to being listened to. His intelligence has become part of his certainty about himself.
That makes it especially funny when the weekend begins undermining every assumption he has about human behaviour.
Leopold can construct theories about life, but theory is not very useful when desire begins operating independently of reason.
The film repeatedly returns to that idea.
People know what they are supposed to want. They know who they are supposed to love. They know what respectable behaviour looks like.
Then somebody walks across a lawn on a warm afternoon and all that knowledge becomes surprisingly negotiable.
Leopold believes human behaviour can be explained. The summer keeps producing evidence that desire has never read his books.
Mia Farrow’s Ariel is at the centre of much of this rearrangement. This was Farrow’s first film with Allen, and there is something interesting about seeing the beginning of a screen collaboration that would become so important to the films of the 1980s.
Ariel initially seems almost ethereal. She is younger than Leopold, beautiful and composed, and for a while she appears to belong to his carefully ordered intellectual world.
Andrew’s reaction tells us immediately that there is more history beneath the surface.
He has encountered her before, and that memory becomes increasingly important. What might have happened between them, what almost happened and what could still happen begin to blur together.
That is one of the film’s recurring pleasures. Attraction rarely begins at the moment we see it. These characters carry old possibilities with them.
Ariel is not simply an object of desire either. As the weekend develops, she becomes less mysterious and more actively involved in deciding what she wants.
Maxwell wants her. Andrew wants another chance with her. Leopold believes he is about to marry her.
Ariel has her own ideas.
Tony Roberts is enormously enjoyable as Maxwell because he plays almost the exact opposite of Allen’s Andrew.
Andrew worries before anything happens. Maxwell generally assumes everything will work out in his favour.
He is confident, experienced and completely at ease with his appetite. Where Andrew analyses desire, Maxwell simply follows it.
Roberts had already proved how well he worked opposite Allen, and the contrast remains effortless. Andrew needs reassurance. Maxwell seems unable to imagine why reassurance would ever be necessary.
The friendship also gives the film some of its funniest conversations. Andrew is trying to understand what has gone wrong in his marriage, while Maxwell approaches sexual behaviour as though the answer to almost every difficulty is simply more sexual behaviour.
Yet Maxwell is not quite as emotionally invulnerable as he thinks.
Once the attractions begin crossing over, even the character who regards himself as the great expert in desire discovers that wanting somebody and being wanted are not always the same thing.
Andrew thinks too much about desire. Maxwell barely thinks about it at all. Neither approach proves especially reliable.
Julie Hagerty’s Dulcy may be the person most comfortable with herself.
Hagerty has a wonderfully light comic presence. Dulcy talks about sex with none of the embarrassment that surrounds the other characters, and this gives her an almost modern quality within the period setting.
She does not seem particularly interested in judging anybody.
That makes her conversations with Mary Steenburgen’s Adrian especially important.
Adrian is initially the most restrained member of the group. She loves Andrew, but something between them has stopped working. The problem is not presented as hostility. In some ways that makes it sadder.
They like one another. They have affection. What has disappeared is the physical connection that used to sit alongside it.
Steenburgen plays that uncertainty beautifully.
Adrian is not searching for an affair when the weekend begins. She is trying to understand why a part of herself has apparently gone quiet.
Dulcy’s openness gives her another way of thinking about it.
The film is very good on the strange effect other couples can have on a relationship. You see how somebody else behaves, how somebody else talks about desire, and suddenly things you had accepted as fixed begin to look less inevitable.
Adrian starts the weekend believing she has a particular problem. By the end, she has discovered that the problem may have been much more specific than she imagined.
Steenburgen also plays one of the film’s loveliest musical moments, sitting at the piano and performing Schubert.
Music, landscape and desire are constantly intertwined here.
The country seems to give everybody permission to behave differently.
The countryside does not change these people so much as remove the usual distractions that help them ignore what they already want.
Gordon Willis is essential to the film.
He had already photographed darkness magnificently for Allen, from the severe rooms of Interiors to the black-and-white New York of Manhattan and the haunted faces of Stardust Memories.
Here he is asked to do something completely different.
Allen wanted the countryside to look beautiful, and Willis gives him summer in abundance: tall grass, trees, warm light, water, picnics, meadows and evenings that seem designed to make sensible behaviour difficult.
This is one of the Allen films where I find myself looking at the landscape almost as much as the actors.
There is a softness to the outdoor photography that fits the material perfectly. The whole film seems to exist for a few days between ordinary reality and a romantic dream.
That is why the title works so well.
Shakespeare is obviously sitting somewhere in the background: midsummer, woodland, romantic confusion, couples rearranging themselves and a slight suggestion that the natural world is capable of interfering with human plans.
Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night is another obvious reference point, although Allen himself resisted the idea that the film should simply be regarded as an adaptation.
What matters more to me is the shared structure of a country gathering where apparently stable romantic arrangements become unstable.
Allen then makes that structure his own.
Andrew’s inventions belong nowhere else. The flying bicycle, the strange mechanisms and the spirit ball introduce an almost Jules Verne-like quality into a comedy of manners.
That combination should feel mismatched, but it does not.
The inventions express Andrew’s personality. He wants life to surprise him. He needs the possibility that things exist beyond what everyone else accepts as reasonable.
In that sense, he and Leopold represent two completely different ways of confronting the world.
Leopold wants certainty.
Andrew wants wonder.
The film has much more affection for Andrew’s position.
Andrew’s machines may not work very well, but his belief that life contains things we cannot explain turns out to be surprisingly useful.
Mendelssohn completes the atmosphere.
The decision to use his music throughout gives the film a unity that an original comic score might not have achieved.
His A Midsummer Night’s Dream music is the most obvious connection, but Allen also draws on the Third Symphony, the Violin Concerto and the Second Piano Concerto.
The music makes the characters’ romantic confusion seem both more elegant and slightly more ridiculous.
That combination is exactly right.
These are intelligent adults behaving in ways they know are irrational, surrounded by music that gives their adventures the scale of romantic destiny.
Of course, some of what feels like destiny is simply lust.
The film knows the difference and enjoys pretending that it does not.
I also appreciate how contained the story is.
Six principal characters are enough. There is no need for elaborate plotting or a large supporting cast because every change in one relationship immediately affects the others.
Andrew wants Ariel, which affects Adrian and Leopold. Maxwell wants Ariel, which affects Dulcy and Andrew. Adrian becomes attracted to Maxwell, which changes Andrew’s understanding of his own marriage.
Everybody is connected.
The comedy comes from watching those connections tighten until somebody inevitably does something foolish.
There are moments when the film is extremely broad, and there are others where Allen seems content simply to watch these people talk in the grass or wander through the woods.
That looseness is intentional.
He later described the film as a kind of small intermezzo, and that is a useful way of thinking about it.
Not every Woody Allen film needs to carry the weight of mortality, artistic failure or moral responsibility.
Sometimes people can simply spend a summer weekend being attracted to one another.
Its lightness is not a failure to become something bigger. Lightness is the thing the film is trying to achieve.
That may also explain why I enjoy it more now.
Seen only in relation to Allen’s major films around it, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy can look comparatively slight.
It comes after Manhattan and Stardust Memories and before the extraordinary run that includes Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters.
Almost anything would look modest in that company.
But watching it on its own terms reveals a film that knows exactly what kind of pleasure it wants to provide.
The pleasure is partly visual. Few Allen films spend this much time simply enjoying summer.
It is also musical. Mendelssohn seems to float through the landscape rather than sit heavily on top of it.
And much of the pleasure comes from the cast.
Allen and Roberts already know exactly how to play against one another. Steenburgen brings warmth and intelligence to Adrian. Hagerty is funny without forcing the comedy. Ferrer gives Leopold exactly the right amount of authority, and Farrow’s Ariel remains just elusive enough for several characters to project their fantasies onto her.
The ensemble feels balanced.
Nobody needs to dominate because the whole film is about the way one person’s desire changes somebody else’s situation.
By the end, the spirit ball and the supernatural suggestions have pushed the story gently beyond realism.
I like that too.
A completely rational ending would almost betray the atmosphere the film has spent so much time creating.
The woods, moonlight and Mendelssohn have already suggested that ordinary rules might not apply here.
Perhaps that is the film’s most appealing idea.
People enter the weekend convinced they understand themselves.
They leave with rather less certainty.
And that is probably healthy.
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy does not pretend that romantic confusion can be permanently solved. Desire will remain inconvenient, timing will remain unreliable and people will continue wanting things that make little logical sense.
But for one summer weekend, the confusion is allowed to feel beautiful.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
A Wall Street stockbroker and enthusiastic amateur inventor whose marriage has lost its physical spark and whose past with Ariel suddenly becomes very important.
Mia Farrow
Leopold’s much younger fiancée and a woman from Andrew’s past whose arrival unsettles several relationships during the weekend.
José Ferrer
A distinguished professor and committed rationalist preparing to marry Ariel, confident that the world can be understood through intellect and reason.
Julie Hagerty
Maxwell’s free-spirited companion, whose openness about sex and desire has a liberating effect on the more restrained people around her.
Tony Roberts
Andrew’s doctor friend, a confident womaniser who arrives with Dulcy and quickly becomes interested in someone else.
Mary Steenburgen
Andrew’s wife, struggling to understand the disappearance of desire from their marriage before the weekend changes her understanding of the problem.
Mendelssohn turns the countryside into a romantic dream
Rather than commission a conventional original score, Allen builds the film’s musical identity around Felix Mendelssohn. The music gives the summer landscape elegance and romantic momentum while linking the film unmistakably to the world suggested by its title.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Mendelssohn’s music for Shakespeare gives Allen’s summer comedy its most natural musical counterpart. The combination of romance, woodland magic and shifting lovers feels completely at home within the film’s turn-of-the-century country setting.
A classical soundtrack for changing affections
Allen draws from several major Mendelssohn works rather than depending on a single composition.
Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic are heard performing the Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, known as the Scottish Symphony.
The soundtrack also includes the Violin Concerto in E Minor and Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor, giving the film an unusually unified classical palette.
Scottish Symphony
Performed by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, the work brings sweeping orchestral movement to the film’s pastoral setting.
Violin Concerto in E Minor
Mendelssohn’s celebrated violin concerto appears in a performance by Stoika Milanova with the TVR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vassil Stefanov.
Piano Concerto No. 2
Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra perform Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Concerto in D Minor.
Felix Mendelssohn
By building the soundtrack around one composer, Allen gives the country weekend a consistent romantic character even as the couples themselves become increasingly inconsistent.
Locations
Allen wanted to give the countryside the same kind of visual attention he had previously given New York, and much of the film was shot in and around Pocantico Hills and Tarrytown in New York State.
The production spent months working around a specially constructed Victorian-Edwardian country house on an estate belonging to the Rockefeller family, with Gordon Willis making the surrounding landscape one of the film’s most important elements.
Pocantico Hills
Much of the film was made around Pocantico Hills, approximately an hour outside New York City, giving the story its secluded summer atmosphere.
Rockefeller Estate
The production used land on a Rockefeller family estate in Tarrytown for the country-house setting at the centre of the story.
Columbia University
Columbia University was used for the academic setting associated with Professor Leopold at the beginning of the film.
The Catskills
Allen also described the production as filming in upper New York State in the Catskills, extending the film’s rural New York setting.
The Country House
The Victorian-Edwardian house was constructed specifically for the production on the Rockefeller estate and became the visual centre of the film’s weekend of romantic confusion.
Summer in New York
Fields, woods, water and long outdoor sequences allowed Gordon Willis to create one of the most pastoral-looking films of Allen’s career.
Awards and Recognition
A Lighter Intermezzo
After the intensity of Stardust Memories, Allen deliberately conceived the film as a smaller and lighter country comedy.
Mia Farrow’s First Allen Film
Ariel marked Mia Farrow’s first appearance in a Woody Allen film, beginning one of the defining screen collaborations of his 1980s work.
Allen’s First Orion Film
The picture marked the beginning of Allen’s feature-film relationship with Orion Pictures.
Gordon Willis in the Country
After the urban imagery of their earlier collaborations, Willis and Allen created a warm colour film in which summer landscape, changing light and the natural world are central to the mood.