So I’ve got this Ingmar Bergman Criterion boxed set, though I really want to emphasize that the word “boxed set” is stretched almost to the breaking point here — it’s 39 movies on 30 discs, with a gigantic hardcover-novel-sized book of companion essays. Just completely absurdly huge.

Like the Agnès Varda one, this one is programmed with a kind of thematically interesting viewing order, and the first disc was this, a 1955… sex comedy?! Not what I was expecting, but yes, that’s exactly what it is.

But it’s not some weird precursor to American Pie, it’s like one of those Shakespearean comedies. The basic idea is that this middle-aged lawyer is married to a very young bride (like, they got married when she was 16, yikes) who is clearly flirting with his adult preacher-to-be son from his first marriage; and meanwhile, an actress who is the lawyer’s former mistress is in town, and she’s the current mistress of an army officer whose wife sorta wishes that maybe he wasn’t so enamored of a mistress at all. Stir up some conflict, and then invite them all to a country house owned by the actress’s acerbic mother for a weekend-long party full of schemes, and we’re off to the races.

It is absolutely a comedy, with sharp dialogue that actually did elicit surprised laughs, but it’s also very definitely Bergman. It’s decidedly dark in a few places, the characters do a lot of abstruse philosophizing, and there’s a fundamental underlying seriousness; even the comedy is about the kind of tension between the reality of our lives and the face we put on them.

As with most old and foreign films (and especially with old foreign films), it’s also a fascinating glimpse at a different cultural milieu. As in The Earrings of Madame de…, the characters are surprisingly open about cheating on their spouses and yet also nobody seems entirely chill with it, either. I feel certain that people of this time and place read these relationships differently than we would, but I honestly have no idea which of the things here are strange-because-it’s-a-movie and which are strange-but-that-was-normal-then.

Anyway, though, this genuinely is a well-made quality movie, but it’s also just like an hour and a half of light fun, not some serious affair that you need to buckle down for. Maybe one of my favorite comedies ever, and highly recommended.