Bergman Island

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

BERGMAN ISLAND   ***

Mia Hansen-Løve

2021

IDEA:  A writer-director couple experiences rifts in their relationship when they sojourn to Ingmar Bergman's longtime residence of Fårö to work on their respective projects.

BLURB:  “Why doesn’t he ever show any tenderness or light? Why didn’t he ever once want to explore… happiness?,” inquires Vicky Krieps’ frustrated Chris, referring to the legendary Swedish director. Although it’s a somewhat specious, overgeneralizing assessment, there’s also truth to it: Bergman was not a sunny guy. Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island is less a counterpoint than an homage in a more sanguine key, an introspective but comparatively lighthearted descendant of the master’s work that also meditates on his cultural legacy. The film’s meta-textuality is underscored by its semi-autobiographical protagonists, writer-directors Chris and Tony (a wryly aloof Tim Roth standing in for Hansen-Løve's real-life partner Olivier Assayas). Their summer trip to the eponymous island sees their relationship absorbing shades of the fraught uncertainties that beset so many of Bergman’s couples. Also hanging heavy in the air are the biographical details of Bergman’s own life, his notoriously prickly, philandering behavior raising questions about the egos and work-life relationships of prolific male creators, including Tony. Hansen-Løve uses her characters’ cinephile-friendly intellectual discourse as an appetizer for the film’s second half, in which Tony’s professional concerns are displaced by Chris’s, whose in-film screenplay we see enacted as a wistful, quasi-wish-fulfillment fantasy of youthful polyamory. Although Bergman Island ironically loses much of its steam in this crucial section devoted to the main female character’s flowering creative agency, Hansen-Løve maintains a nuanced, lovely control of mood and form throughout. Notably, she films Fårö as Bergman never did: in romantic, golden-hued widescreen, where relationships might not fall apart after all.