The story came about while Allen was waiting for his film Zelig (1983) to be budgeted. "I thought it would be fun to get some people in a country house and just celebrate summer make it very beautiful, with butterfly nets and badminton courts and picnicking. [...] And I wrote the script in two weeks. Just this simple story, like a-day-in-the-country for fun. And I thought, Why should I wait? I'll do them both at the same time. What's the difference? And I did."
Mia Farrow wrote in her autobiography, What Falls Away that the movie was filmed at Pocantico Hills, in a house that was built specifically for the film on the Rockefeller estate one hour outside of New York City. The house, which was not built to standard building codes, was later improved and sold as a dwelling. "The film was shot almost entirely outdoors with the incomparable Gordon Willis as cinematographer. Our days were spent waiting for moments of perfect light. Meanwhile I was in the camper (Woody and I shared one throughout thirteen films), wearing a robe, with my hair tightly wrapped around cone-shaped curlers, my torso compressed into a killer corset. Bleary-eyed from a pulverizing headache (the curlers, the corset, the heat, the humidity, the nerves), I just wished I could be my sister [Steffi, who acted as Farrows stand-in] out there looking adorable in her jeans and baseball cap and straight hair, lounging in the tall grass, strolling under the trees, talking and laughing with Woody."
Filming with Allen brought out Farrow's insecurities about her own talent, "At times during shooting, I was overpowered by such a paralysis that I couldn't understand who the characters were supposed to be or what they were doing. Woody, now my director, was a stranger to me. His icy sternness pushed my apprehension toward raw fear. I was no artist, only the most inept poseur. This seemingly straightforward material was beyond my capabilities. I remembered the movie Pat and Mike (1952), in which Katharine Hepburn, a professional athlete, was unable to do a thing when Spencer Tracy was around. My instincts, an actor's lifeline, screamed to head for the hills. By midmovie I had an ulcer and was taking Tagamet four times a day. I was so apprehensive, dispirited, and humiliated, and so convinced I had failed Woody; that I asked if in the future, if there was a future, I could be his assistant, so I wouldn't have to act. He looked at me doubtfully and said, 'It's hard work being an assistant.'" Allen was unaware of Farrow's plight, saying, "I calmed her but I was not completely sympathetic, because I didn't realize the dimensions, the gravity. I knew she'd be wonderful in it. It never occurred to me she'd disappoint me.
According to Farrow, Allen worked on A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy during the summer, back-to-back with Zelig, which was to begin shooting in the fall. Both films took longer than anticipated and overlapped with Broadway Danny Rose (1984), which in turn ran into The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). "There were days when we shot scenes from two or three different films."
Allen and Gordon Willis were very careful about lighting the film, "We talked a lot about the coloring. We wanted to film during the most beautiful days in the country that you could think of. We just made it as lovely as we could. And everything was subsumed into that. We made sure that the light was perfect all the time and that the sun was at the exact right place. Finally, by the end of the season we were painting all the leaves green."
The critical reaction to A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was mixed. Roger Ebert, writing for The Chicago Sun-Times observed that "the film is so low-key, so sweet and offhand and slight, there are times when it hardly even seems happy to be a movie. I am not quite sure what Allen had in mind when he conceived this material, but in addition to the echoes of Shakespeare and of [Ingmar] Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), there are suggestions of John Cheever's Wapshots, Doctorow's Ragtime, and Jean Renoir's films in which nice people do nice things to little avail." Allen himself admitted, "Nobody came to see A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. One of the critics who likes my work very much said that it was the only trivial picture that I ever made. Richard Schickel from Time Magazine. But I wanted it to be light. I just wanted it to be a small intermezzo with a few laughs. I don't say this was any great picture at all, but in general this atmosphere is something that nobody cares about here in the United States. For me it was fine. I had a great time doing it. I wanted to do for the country what I'd done for New York in Manhattan (1979). I wanted to show it in all its beauty. [...] I thought it was good when I wrote it, and I thought it was good when I made it. But it was not appreciated at all. This one and September (1987) are my two biggest financial disasters."
Producer: Robert Greenhut
Director: Woody Allen
Screenplay: Woody Allen
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Art Direction: Speed Hopkins
Music: Felix Mendelssohn
Film Editing: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen (Andrew), Mia Farrow (Ariel), Jose Ferrer (Leopold), Julie Hagerty (Dulcy), Tony Roberts (Maxwell), Mary Steenburgen (Adrian), Adam Redfield (Student Foxx), Moishe Rosenfeld (Mr. Hayes), Timothy Jenkins (Mr. Thomson), Michael Higgins (Reynolds), Sol Frieder (Carstairs), Boris Zoubok (Purvis), Thomas Barbour (Blint), Kate McGregor-Stewart (Mrs. Baker).
C-88m. Letterboxed.
by Lorraine LoBianco
SOURCES:
The Chicago Sun-Times: A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy by Roger Ebert, January 1, 1982
Woody Allen by Eric Lax
What Falls Away by Mia Farrow
"Woody Allen on Woody Allen" in Conversations with Stig Bjorkman by Woody Allen and Stig Bjorkman
The Internet Movie Database
