America appears to be the only country in the world where love is a national problem.
— Raoul de Roussy de Sales
Woody Allen's new picture is a comedy of manners set in upstate New York at the turn of the century. Andrew (Woody Allen) owns a country home there and away from his work as a Wall Street investment broker, he fiddles with his inventions — a flying machine and a magic lantern which puts him in touch with the spirit world. Since he has been unable to sexually arouse his wife Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) for the past six months, the marriage is taxing both of them.
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, with its theme of the confusions and enchantments of love, contains intimations of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of A Summer Night. Gordon Willis's cinematography makes the most of this bucolic setting, and Mendelsson's music on the soundtrack helps give the story a wistfulness appropriate to its subject matter.
Andrew is quite shaken when Adrian's cousin Leopold (Jose Ferrer), a middle-aged philosopher, comes to visit bringing Ariel (Mia Farrow), his bride-to-be. She is one of Andrew's old flames. Matters of the heart are further complicated when Maxwell (Tony Roberts), the inventor's best friend, arrives with Dulcy (Julia Hagerty), his sexually liberated girlfriend. Under the full moon, these characters all yearn to savor forbidden pleasures with each other's mates.
Ariel is pursued by Andrew who wants to seize the moment and redeem the past. Maxwell, who believes that "marriage is the death of hope," sees Adrian as the angel who can make him happy. Leopold, the stuffy scholar with opinions on everything, is introduced to the animal side of his nature by Dulcy, who also lectures Adrian on how to sexually please her husband.
Woody Allen again circles around the nuances of love — a web which both tantalizes and confounds Americans. Can one really separate feelings of love and lust? Is fidelity a liberation or a prison? And what are we to make of the line "Sex alleviates tension; love causes it"?
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is another cinematic valentine from Woody Allen to his impatient audience who seem to want him to return to his earlier zany days. In a recent interview Norman Mailer said: "You can never understand a writer until you find his private little vanity and mine has always been that I will frustrate expectations." That sounds just like Woody Allen!