A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy was the first of thirteen films that Woody Allen would make starring Mia Farrow.
Grade: C+ (** out of *****)
Her role was originally written for Diane Keaton, another Allen’s earlier collaborator, but Keaton was preoccupied promoting Reds and preparing production on Shoot the Moon. Julie Hagerty, Mary Steenburgen, Tony Roberts and Jose Ferrer co-star.
It also marks the first time Allen was an ensemble performer, while previously, he had been the lead character or did not appear at all.
Set in 1906 in upstate New York, distinguished philosopher Leopold and his younger fiancée Ariel spend a weekend in the country with Leopold’s cousin Adrian, and her crackpot inventor husband Andrew.
Also on the guest list is womanizing doctor, Maxwell, and his latest girlfriend, a free-thinking nurse, Dulcy.
Over the course of the weekend, old romances reignite, new romances develop, and everyone ends up sneaking off behind everyone else’s backs.
A slight, perhaps too gentle (it lacks witty or funny dialogue), this harmless sweetly paced movie was a minor romantic comedy, too derivative of Ingmar Bergman’s film, which had served as inspiration.
Major problem is the lack of real sex appeal of any of the characters, and lack of chemistry between any of the couples or triangles.
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy received positive reviews but was a commercial disappointment. It was nominated for one Razzie Award for Worst Actress, for Farrow – the only time an Allen film has been nominated for a Razzie.
Inspiration for the film:
I thought I wanted to do a film about poignant relationships, a film about a guy who missed an opportunity and was haunted by the thought and a girl who was about to throw in her lot with a much older man, not really the right one for her. The genesis was not a comedy but a kind of serious Chekhovian story, in the style of Interiors almost. Then I started to think, God, it sort of cries out for a comic treatment—a group of people at a summer house on a weekend and the silvery moon in concert with the animals and flowers. Why not take a comic approach to it? Let the seriousness be a subtext. So I started to write it, and it worked very rapidly for me. I started to take delight in it. I hate the country, but I began wanting to create the country, not as I experience it but as I would like to.
Cast
Woody Allen as Andrew
Mia Farrow as Ariel Weymouth
José Ferrer as Professor Leopold Sturges
Julie Hagerty as Dulcy Ford
Tony Roberts as Dr. Maxwell Jordan
Mary Steenburgen as Adrian
Adam Redfield as Student Foxx
Moishe Rosenfeld as Mr. Hayes
Timothy Jenkins as Mr. Thomson
Michael Higgins as Reynolds
disappointing about ‘Sex Comedy’ is that for all its incessant—and anachronistic—talk, there’s a serious shortage of new ideas from writer-director Allen. The film’s fullest idea is that opportunity, once lost, can never again be recaptured. We might have hoped for this bittersweetness and a great deal more from one of the screen’s nerviest innovators.”[10] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post stated, “The crucial problem with ‘Sex Comedy’ is that one detects no persuasive sexual chemistry in any of the alleged, three-cornered mating games. It’s impossible to believe that anyone’s susceptibilities are deeply stirred or anyone’s feelings likely to be hurt. Allen can’t establish the basic sense of attraction and the emotional gravity that underscores the frivolity of the romantic hide-and-seek.”[11] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote, “The group is rather amusing, and for a while the film seems saucy and fairly promising (when we learn, for example, that the prof and his fiancée met at the Vatican). Viewers may feel that everything must be building toward a big, explosive joke. But nothing really develops—not even the clashes that are prepared for. Nothing busts loose.”[12]
