I am sitting here blogging, looking out over the Baltic from my bolthole in Scandinavia. It is a lovely morning and pretty Swedish women come and go in my seaside coffee shop. I look out at the archipelago – little islands peppered with summer houses and I think about Ingmar Bergman and how he understood the psyche of the Scandinavian sexual mind.
His wonderful comedy about infidelity – Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) has just been released as a Blu-Ray (I have a copy of the original DVD) .
The year is 1901. Desirée Armfeldt, an actress once involved with lawyer Fredrik Egerman, is having an affair with Count Malcolm, husband of Charlotte. Egerman has married the much younger Anne, still a virgin, who is intrigued by Egerman’s scholarly son, Henrik. When Desirée comes to town for a play, complications arise, not least when the principals assemble at the estate of Desirée’s mother, a former courtesan.
The degree to which these people overthink their lives is reflected in the carefree way Petra, Anne’s maid, teases Henrik and takes up with Frid, a groom working at the estate. And the antics of the Egermans and the Malcolms are placed in perspective by the elder Armfeldt, a world-weary but worldly wise soul who tells her daughter that she should have seen the way things worked in the old days.
Asked whether she might write her memoirs, the mother replies that she “got this mansion for promising not to write my memoirs.” But she has clearly been reading Oscar Wilde, since Bergman invests so much of what she says with a Wildean outrageousness. “If people only knew how unhealthy it is to listen to what people say, they never would,” she opines to her daughter, “and then they would feel so much better.”
I return to my coffee and morning bun and reflect on the coming of midsummer and the pretty Swedish women all around me.