Bergman Island |
(M) 113 minutes * * * *
BERGMAN ISLAND follows a couple of American filmmakers, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who retreat to the mythical Fårö island for the summer.
In this wild, breathtaking landscape where Bergman lived and shot his most celebrated pieces, they hope to find inspiration for their upcoming films. As days spent separately pass by, the fascination for the island operates on Chris and souvenirs of her first love resurface.
Lines between reality and fiction will then progressively blur and tear our couple even more apart.
Rating: R (Nudity|Language|Some Sexual Content)
Genre: Drama, Romance
Mia Wasikowska, Tim Roth, Vicky Krieps, Anders Danielsen Lie, Joel Spira, Gabe Klinger
OFFICIAL TRAILER
REVIEWS
86% TOMATOMETER
52% AUDIENCE SCORE
Review by PAUL BYRNES - TheAge
Who wouldn't want to live on Bergman Island? Wait, which Bergman? Ingrid or Ingmar? The latter would be a darker place than the former - indeed, you might meet Death stalking you on the beach, wearing a dark cloak and carrying a crook. Anyone for chess?
In fact, that famous scene from Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal was filmed at Scania, in southern Sweden, not Faro, the island where Bergman lived for much of his life. He made six films on Faro, and there is a Bergman Centre and a Bergman Week - both of which feature in Mia Hansen-Love's Bergman Island, a beguiling rumination on love and gender (as in, why are men such bastards?) .
You don't have to be familiar with Bergman's work to like Hansen-Love's movie, although it helps if you know his place in the pantheon of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. That explains why Tony Sanders (Tim Roth), famous British filmmaker and his wife, Chris (Luxembourgborn Vicky Krieps), rising screenwriter, come to Faro to work on their respective projects, during a residency at the Bergman Centre.
They stay in the farmhouse where Bergman had his studio, but Chris finds it hard to concentrate. The view of the ocean is distracting and she has always been ambivalent about Bergman. She loves his work but doesn't quite like the man, partly because of the ways he treated women and the many children he sired. Tony is untroubled by Bergman's darker side - that's probably because he's similarly self-obsessed . Roth gives one of his " I don't care if you like me' ' performances, barely concealing his harsh tongue and lack of empathy.
To follow the romantic disintegration of these two might have been dull, but Hansen-Love is never that. She shifts gear, as Chris strikes out in her writing. We then follow that story, with Mia Wasikowska as a brittle young woman arriving on the island for a wedding. Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), the boy she loved as a teenager, is there. Her heart starts to beat faster, although both of them are now in other relationships.
So we have a kind of inverted, Nordic version of a Shakespearean romcom - an island, a wedding, a series of mishaps - but with sombre mood rather than thigh-slapping wit. The mirth is in the way Hansen-Love observes these mere mortals in pursuit of love and happiness and in the playful forms of a story within a story, a film within a film . Wasikowska's presence, waif-like and transparently vulnerable, transforms the tone and tempo. She is hellbent on love, and that gives the film real energy.
Love is Hansen-Love's special subject. All of her movies are about its ups and downs, as well as betrayal, renewal, a second chance. Since 2008, she has made a series of haunting and beautiful films about women in love, with and without men: All Is Forgiven, Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love, Eden, Things to Come and Maya. Her work is always unpredictable, nuanced, subject to few conventions or compromises. She's among the most consistently interesting directors at work today.
Director Olivier Assayas cast her as a 16-year-old in Late August, Early September in 1998, then Sentimental Destinies. They were a couple from 2002 to 2017, so it is tempting to see Tony and Chris as autobiographical. Yes and no, the director has said. She wrote the film on the island and has visited several times, but never with Assayas, who had never been to Faro.
Her script was more directly personal in the ideas she was thinking through, such as: can a woman raise happy children and still pursue an artistic life? Bergman had nine children from six different relationships, and very little involvement with any of them. Hansen-Love has two children, and the pull of work versus the responsibility of children is pretty much a universal theme nowadays.
Bergman Island might strike some as too clever, too constructed, but how much is too much? She keeps close to her characters. They are the reason for her films . Both Wasikowska and Krieps respond with full heart to their roles. You can't ask for more than that.
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➼ Bergman Island
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