The intrigue, in The Naked Night, or at least the main theme, can be put in a nutshell: after several months on the road, a circus manager returns to the small town where he abandoned his family some time ago. But that isn't the point of the film, mostly interesting in its pitiless depiction of the relations between Man and Woman. Two cases are shown. The first, suggested at the beginning in a dreamlike parenthesis that defies any reference except, paradoxically, Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'or, symbolically makes its fatality weigh on the other. The two are actually very dexterously intertwined, since the presence of the protagonists of the first couple (Frost and his wife Alma) never ceases to anticipate the fate of the other two, actively working at destroying themselves, before our eyes. Albert, the circus manager, vainly tries to return to the place he had abandoned, with his legitimate wife. Anna, his mistress, gives herself to an actor who offends Albert publicly on the evening of the show. Too weak to commit suicide, he continues an existence with Anna based on the acceptance of his cowardice.

Ingmar Bergman offers us a reflection about happiness. But unlike his approach in Summer Interlude and Monika with their evocation of the fugitive northern summer, The Naked Night immediately takes us to the twilight of happiness, the exact time when the most dazzling promises come undone, where the rapture of life falters under the weight of moral debasement. The nostalgia of the early works is replaced by complete pessimism, here. The couple's degradation, shown from the first images, and constantly recalled throughout, symbolically assigns an irreversible fate to Albert (as the clown does to Professor Unrath in The Blue Angel). The outcome is fatal, since it is written into the first images. Once again, Ingmar Bergman seems to be telling us: the nature of happiness is to fall apart at the first difficulty, passing time destroys everything, the gnawing evil in us is a fundamental one.

Time passing. Significantly, the man obsessed by the idea of happiness is also, simultaneously, a magnificent painter of the passing moments of the day, of the most fugitive seasons. The promises of the dawning day are not—can not be—kept by the dying day. The impossibility of holding onto passing time can only be compensated by perpetual nostalgia for the past. Dawn always contains some scraps of night, and the man who contemplates it can only say: is that the remains of night, fading away, or is it already the arrival of another night?

That nostalgia is perhaps what best describes Bergman's characters. It haunts Albert, who vainly attempts to hang on to bygone happiness. His lucidity—Bergman's heroes are always lucid—makes him suffer and indicates the only solution, suicide. Frost himself went that way. But both are resigned, both bear their lucidity like a cross.

Women are the instruments of man's fall, but also of their own fall. For Bergman, a careful observer of the female soul, offers a most ambiguous portrait of womanhood. Womanhood, according to him, is both the best and the worst of things, or rather, temptation by the best and the worst. It attracts and separates, it is the very pivot around which the destinies of couples are knit and unraveled. The coquetry of Anna, who sells her charms on the street, precipitates the drama, just as Alma's exhibitionism brutally breaks her tie to Frost. But although the woman has the initiative and has diabolical power over man, she never has that sureness, that triumphal superiority of Sternberg's Marlène. Calculation never overrides the senses, no more than intelligence overcomes sensitivity. Simply, in the end, lucidity takes its ransom for her past unconsciousness.

Ingmar Bergman ran a theatre in Stockholm that rivalled with Sjöberg's. He gave the best contemporary plays. His attention to his times and to the underlying concerns of those times account for the extraordinary modernism of his cinematographic oeuvre. His mastery of Cinema is only the least of his merits as a director who was above all an author, an author who was above all a man, and a man who was above all a man of our times.