Highly recommended!

I saw it last night, first time on the glorious DVD edition. Had seen it before, but had faded memories.

Glorious photography by Gordon Willis (The Godfather). Music by Felix Mendelssohn.

Three mismatched couples set out for the countryside to have a look at nature (one imagines), and to seek libidinal pleasures.

Don't look for William Wordsworth, however, or for D.H. Lawrence here.

What you have is, as almost always, an irreverent farce, intended to ridicule both romantic and sexual love, and to illustrate the pettiness of human sexual relations. Nothing biting or archetypal here--just a little Woody Allen wit (when it hits), a little nonsense, silly people doing silly things, no love scenes to speak of, no plotline worth following, no memorable scenes (as happens in some Woody Allen). Of course, the literary references are there--this is a takeoff on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (what else with a title like that?)--the parody of a lyric farce, to put it this way--and the musical application of Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream."

The whole blends wonderfully, if you don't mind all of the above and if you are intent on the photography and the music--and a few of the comic situations that spring up in the middle of the inanity of the whole, or the good one-liners that inevitably creep into everything Woody-Allenish. Of particular comic treat is Jose Ferrer's unexpected tantrum-like imitation of a bland, utterly preposterous professor of philosophy, who preaches the pleasures of the flesh and the non-existence of the spirit (no evidence of that, he says); one Leopold who is about to be married to one Ariel (Mia Farrow), while casting out his net for his friendly doctor's (Tony Roberts') little wife (Julie Haggerty); the doctor, however, lusts for Ariel, as does Allen (almost forgotten in his second-fiddle role here), whose marriage to Mary Steenburgen is a sexual calamity. Incidentally, to the movie's credit, Allen has departed from his usual Manhattan persona as a schnook/lover/intellectual, and he presents himself as an inventor of totally useless devices, a soul-lamp (I don't know what else to call it), for instance, which lights up and explodes when a body is severed from its soul. There is also a flying machine, propelled by bicycle pedals--ridden by Allen himself who lands on various bushes. Of course, the tangle of trios is untangled somewhat when the professor gives up the spirit in the middle of an extra-rapturous lust spasm with Haggerty (we don't see this). The lamp lights, of course, and the plot ends--there is nothing else to say.

Go back to the music, if you will, and the several exquisite shots of dahlias, flower-beds, bees gathering pollen, or birds in the midst of a love-song. All this in upper New York State, which has gardens one can imagine only in Jane Austen film festivals. If you are a lover of Woody Allen no matter what, you already have seen this several times. If you are not, give it a try. Art for art's sake (which this vaguely is) is better than dirt for dirt's sake, which this could have been in lesser hands.