A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

1982's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY always struck me as a particularly missable entry in the Woody Allen canon.   To wit, I didn't see it until almost forty years after its original release. It just seemed so frothy and without much substance.  After the writer/director's numerous classics of the 1970s, it appeared to fall somewhere between the Goofy and the Serious, the Broad and More High-Minded.  Woody wasn't making slapstick things like BANANAS anymore.  The reviews, many by those who ordinarily championed Allen, were not encouraging.  I would forgo this one but catch most of his films in the rest of the '80s and into the early '00s, when it was becoming clear that he was just making movies to make movies, a dilemma that continued for many years thereafter.

The title recalls Shakespeare, and there are certainly nods, but more often to Ingmar Bergman.  The story takes place in the early twentieth century and involves a weekend in the county with three couples.  Andrew (Allen) is a full time Wall Streeter and part-time inventor married to Adrian (Mary Steenburgen), who has been frigid for the past year.  Medical doctor Maxwell Jordan (Allen regular Tony Roberts) is a womanizing bachelor who brings along his sexually liberated and aggressive nurse Duly (Julie Hagerty).  Joining them is Prof. Leopold Sturges (Jose Ferrer), who has no use for anything spiritual, and his much younger fiancee Ariel (Mia Farrow, in her first Allen film), who are to be married over the weekend.   It is soon obvious that there are attractions among them that crisscross. Maybe some secret histories.  There will be covert rendezvous by the lake and admissions of love for those who belong to another.  There will also be an attempted suicide and injury by bow and arrow. 

Woody made the decision to treat what could've easily been an emotional bloodbath with a light, comic sensibility.  Such relational foibles have always been part of Allen's examinations.  Again we have discussions of fidelity, potency, metaphysics, intellectualism, religion, etc.  Lots of hit and miss Allen jokes.  The characters at times feel like real people, other times like New Yorker cartoons.  They prance around the picturesque countryside as lensed by the great Gordon Willis, who again delivers stunning photography.  Quite surprising that Woody took the action outside his beloved NYC at this point in his career. 

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY is in fact slight and forgettable, but generally charming and minimally exasperating.  I was surprised at how much I liked that mystical finale.