oOoBarracuda Occasionally, a film emerges that is a stellar film ruined by a less than stellar title. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is a film that may fit into that category. Although not a masterpiece, by any means, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is a fine film by writer-director Woody Allen. Released in 1982, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy involves an inventor who hosts a weekend gathering of friends that quickly turns into professions of love altering the lives of everyone involved. Woody Allen plays the role of the idiosyncratic inventor who is experiencing a lack of love and sexual attention from his wife. They invite two couples to spend the weekend with them in their cottage. Maxwell (Tony Roberts) a physician and Andrew's (Woody Allen) best friend who has brought with him a new muse, a nurse that works in his office make up one couple. The other couple that attends is the cousin of Andrew's wife, Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) Leopold (José Ferrer). Leopold is a philosophy professor who has always spoken negatively of marriage before meeting his fiancé. Unbeknownst to Andrew, Leopold's fiancé turns out to be Ariel (Mia Farrow), his former girlfriend. The spark is reignited between Ariel and Andrew, but a new flame emerges between Ariel and Maxwell, also. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy has not been one of my favorite discoveries through this Woody Allen project I've been working through. There were some signature Woody Allen aspects that kept me happy enough, however. The music in this film was as divine as the music always is in every Woody Allen film. The film was opened with a discussion on metaphysical philosophy which will always be something this philosophy minor will be all-in for. The film was also shot beautifully with gorgeous images of landscape, animals, and geography gracing the screen. All-in-all, there is enough in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy to tide over the loyal Allen-ist but certainly not the feast some of his other work is.

Lee Eisenberg "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" is one of Woody Allen's movies making fun of rich people's relationships. Based on an Ingmar Bergman movie that I haven't seen, it depicts some couples spending the weekend with an inventor (Allen) and his wife (Mary Steenburgen). The six of them then proceed to start having affairs with each other! The movie's downside is of course that Woody Allen started obsessing on neurotic rich people having affairs, and eventually reached an all-time nadir with "Everyone Says I Love You". Even so, what the movie itself shows is some really funny stuff. More than anything, it demonstrates that Allen is at his best when just trying to be funny ("Take the Money and Run", "Bananas", "Sleeper"). Other than that, the movie has some typical Woody Allen-style lines, and an almost mystifying ending. Really interesting. Also starring José Ferrer, Mia Farrow (in her first appearance in an Allen movie), Tony Roberts and Julie Hagerty (of "Airplane!" fame).

Robert J. Maxwell I think I see what Woody Allen was getting at here -- a kind of salubrious combination of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Ingmar Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night." A handful of real or aspiring intellectuals spend a weekend in a country estate just after the turn of the last century. (And what a cast they are!) Some of them know one another and others are strangers.All are distinguishable in one way or another. Jose Ferrer is the snooty man of science who doesn't believe in spirits or spiritual lives. Tony Roberts is the naturalist and doctor who is more interested in leaves than science. Mia Farrow is Ariel (another nod to Shakespeare), an old love of Allen's who is about to marry the older Ferrer on Monday. Mary Steenburgen is Allen's wife who is concerned that their marriage is going stale and asks the other women about the best way to please a man in bed. Roberts falls for Farrow. So does Allen. Ferrer wants to make it with Julie Haggarty. Assignations are clumsily arranged and then fall apart for one or another reason. The guests see visions of fairies when they stare at a spirit ball. Globular lights dance around among the trees.Well, I'm all for enchanted forests. The folklore of northern Europe is itself enchanted. "Fairy rings" formed of mushrooms and all that.That this movie didn't work for me -- it might well work for others -- is because I simply couldn't care about any of the characters. And the conversational exchanges were only mildly comic. Without characters to care about, lacking a winsome sweetness, and without real laughs, what's left? The usual congeries of Allen's neurotic New York intellectuals falling in love with the wrong people and at odds with one another.Best performance -- and best scene -- go to Jose Ferrer singing lugubrious German Lieder while Steenburgen pounds on the piano. Woody has the good sense to look at the camera (twice) with a mournful expression.But the story is more confusing than enchanting. I understand Woody wrote the screenplay in two weeks, and I believe it.

Isaac5855 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY was Woody Allen's amusing variation on the Ingmar Bergman classic SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, which had been previously re-worked as a Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim called A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. This film is about three couples in turn of the century who gather at one of their country homes for the weekend and it is clear at the beginning of the story that these three couples are hopelessly mismatched and we see the very human foibles that split up and mix up these three couples during this memorable weekend in the country. Woody and Mary Steenburgen plays the hosts for the weekend, a seemingly happily married couple whose happiness is clearly surface deep. Tony Roberts plays a womanizing physician and Woody's best pal who arrives for the weekend with his nurse (Julia Hagerty). In her first screen pairing with Woody Allen, Mia Farrow plays a former flame of Woody's who has arrived with her much older fiancée (Jose Ferrer) who she is scheduled to marry on Monday. Watching these three couples fuss and fumble all over each other in an attempt to be with the person they really want to be with is what makes this charming period comedy work. As always in Woody's films, music is crucial in setting the mood and Woody has chosen some classic Mendelsohhn pieces that set the perfect mood for the piece. The performances are uniformly fine, with Roberts a standout. Not one of Woody's better known films, but if you'd like to see where his relationship with Mia began, take a look.