Bergman Island Review

On paper, Bergman Island it could easily be mistaken for the most influential film ever made. A pair of directors arrive for a screenwriting session at the film’s main dealer, Ingmar Bergman, causing a crisis of trust in their relationship. Add a cinematic meta within a movie and, to everyone else, it feels like it can only be enjoyed with a frown, a black polo, and a pecan roast. Instead, in her first English-language film, French director Mia Hansen-Løve, who has always been the most human of filmmakers, has nothing to do with Scandi’s angst and paranoia, editing a warm and seductive. Light exploration of a shy artist trying to find her voice.

The title island is the mythical Fårö, Bergman’s home and workplace since the 1960s.ghost yarn‘s Vicky Krieps, replacing Greta Gerwig, who abandoned ship to do Little woman) and Tony (Tim Roth). Building on Hansen-Løve’s 15-year union with acclaimed French director Olivier Assayas, Chris is an up-and-coming writer / director, still unsure of herself, married to the eldest and most praised Tony. The latter has been invited to screen his latest film and is enjoying all the Bergmanian goodness the island has to offer. Chris, meanwhile, feels the specter of fatherhood looming over her (“Write here, how can I not feel like a loser?”) And, avoiding Bergman’s organized “safari”, joins forces with an expert from Fårö (Hampus Nordenson ).

Hansen-Løve extracts a fun comic relief from Bergman’s oeuvre (by asking to screen a play, Chris and Tony are weighed down by the cancer drama screams and whispers), but you don’t have to be a bergophile to get it. His work, on the other hand, is the starting point for an incisive portrait not only of a couple in difficulty, but also of the creativity within a relationship. During an argument about Bergman having nine children but an absent father, Chris questions the possibility that a woman will ever have a substantial amount of work and continue to raise children. Hansen-Løve’s empathy behind the camera is palpable.

Halfway through, Chris presents his script to Tony and his story becomes the movie. Independent Linklater-style film, “The White Dress” follows Amy (Mia Wasikowska), a New York director who, leaving her child behind, travels to Fårö to attend a friend’s wedding and reunites with Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie ). , her first love, which inspired her first film. Sometimes it feels like a deliberately stammered first draft, but Wasikowska brings it to life, whether she’s having fun at sea or going wild with “Dancing Queen”.

It is not as complete and consistent as the best of Hansen-Løve (see goodbye first love, Eden, things to come), but it still has its magic. He has the energy of a smile on a summer night, wistful, delicate, deceptively simple on the top and full of tricks below. This summer there is really only one island of Løve to visit.