A Film Canon

If Sawdust And Tinsel attempted to elide the theatre from the genealogy between sideshow and cinema, on the basis of its effeminising, aristocratic tendencies, then Smiles Of A Summer Night wholeheartedly embraces it, as if to provide a blueprint of everything Bergman would discard in the second stage of his filmic career, or an exhaustion and perfection of the first. As a result, a certain sideshow absurdism and cinematic naturalism already prevent the narrative from approximating the stage performance that sets it in motion, as the cuckolding overexposure of Sawdust And Tinsel is distilled into a more seductive, ominous luminosity. Drawn from bedsheets, moonlight and footlights, this 'smile' locates the common denominator between magic and mortality in the first appearance of Bergman's distinctive chamber, here figured more in terms of the loss of virginity than death, in keeping with the comic imperative, but already centred around the dehumanising gleam of the mirror; or, alternatively, around the omniscient mirror in which the characters, all too young or too old to properly love, confuse their future and past selves. To this end, Bergman doesn't direct so much as choreograph, building a rhythm of union, identification and dispersion, with a stylised, ornamental, aphoristic dialogue as his score, and gesturing towards the fusion of music and narrative realised by Sondheim's adaptation.