Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)

Then Back before Lovefilm entered my life to show me the light, I was terribly excited when a Blockbuster Video opened on Edge Lane in Liverpool in the late nineties, so much so that I’d catch a bus from the city centre after work to hire a couple of videos and thence another bus from there home, a trip of at least an hour and a half. The selection seemed wider than the little shop on Allerton Road, far more “World” and “Independent” cinema, bigger back catalogue. It’s from this august selection I procured A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy on VHS overnight.

Now Not one of my favourite Woody Allen films, I’d never quite been able to put my finger on exactly why A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy doesn’t quite work. All of the elements are available. A Shakespearean connection. The music of Mendelssohn beguilingly drifting across honey hewed settings. Mia at her most attractive, her angular face resembling a Klimpt painting, before she spent much of the rest of the decade playing doudy housewives and the put-upon. Woody, with his funny inventions. The downfall of an intellectual because despite his brain he’s still ruled by his pants. Some farce.

Watching the film again on dvd, even on my relatively large screen in a darkened room, one reason suggested itself to me. There is a certain group of films, not as many as you’d think, that don’t work on television, in the home, even on dvd. One3 example is Pulp Fiction. The best experience I had with Tarantino’s postmodern throwback was on the opening night in a Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds packed with students laughing along with the film. Every occasion since then has felt slightly stale somehow. Similarly the best experience I had with Tarkovsky’s film Stalker was sitting on the floor of a seminar room at university with my classmates watching it from under coats and duvets.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy must be one of those films. It’s nothing to do with the technology; it’s to do with the atmosphere of cinema. This is the sort of film that works best projected onto a giant screen, hopefully in one of those dilapidated old independent cinemas with the smell of a thousand similar night captured in the chairs and carpet, and with an audience of like minded people laughing at the jokes, falling silent for the moments of magic realism as the dream-catcher or whatever it is, does its work. Laughing together when Tony Roberts and José Ferrer bump into each other as they wait for each other’s partner by the brook. I missed that.