Film Review: Bergman Island
Images courtesy of Nixco.
The self-referential nature of writing is presented in Bergman Island with its fusion of real life and metafictional narrative.
A couple arrives for a residency on Fårö, the Swedish island made famous on film by director Ingmar Bergman. Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) are escorted to an idyllic house, where they will reside for their stay. They are given the bedroom featured in Scenes from a Marriage, notably remarked upon by their host as “the film which made millions of people divorce”. The two filmmakers settle in respective areas of the property to develop their individual projects. This is one of the instances where director and writer Mia Hansen-Løve displays her inclination to draw from her own experiences, as she developed the story of Bergman Island while completing a similar residency on the iconic island.
Presenting the writing process with its ebbs and flows, and its narrative mutability, the film contrasts the two writers in parallel with each other, while hinting at real-life counterparts. Chris and Tony have a direct, yet universally relatable, connection to Hansen-Løve and her ex-partner Olivier Assayas (director of Personal Shopper and Irma Vep). This style of meta-filmmaking draws into itself and could perhaps diminish the return for a viewer who is not intimately familiar with the creative process.
A fascination with Bergman is inextricable from visitor’s experience of the island (we are taken on a Bergman Safari!) and how he was in real life is held up against the films which he made. The interrogation into such a prominent figure within filmmaking history enriches the underlying deconstruction of what it means to create, and how personal relationships drive the writing process.
Fiction and reality further coalesce as the film kicks into a deeper gear with the introduction of the script that Chris is developing. This film-within-a-film begins to play out on screen, and sees its two main characters Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie from The Worst Person in the World) and Amy (Mia Wasikowska) rekindling a mutual attraction, the remnants of a prior shared history. It’s electric to see these two imagined narratives play out against such a personable, and cinematically rich backdrop. In one of the film's highlights, the scene breaks away from the tangled relationship drama playing out, exceptionally employing an ABBA song with Amy losing herself dancing.
The naturalism imbued in the scenery and between the characters is very easy to settle into, particularly the relationship of Amy and Joseph as it is thoughtfully narrated by Chris. The amalgamation of narratives and time periods re-energizes Hansen-Løve‘s meditative introspection, and the story is structured in a way which shifts easily, and imperceptibly, between multiple realities and fictions. The result is a soothing examination of personal, and geographical history, and from where inspiration germinates.
Bergman Island is showing in cinemas nationally from Thursday 10th of March.