Photo via IFC Films
Bergman Island
Ingmar Bergman is evident throughout French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. That island, Fårö, is a brief car ferry’s passage from Gotland, a larger island off the coast of Sweden. Fårö was Bergman’s home and the backdrop for several of his classics.
In Bergman Island, the house in Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, with its peculiar spiral stairway, is the guest cottage for filmmaker Tony Sanders (Tim Roth) and his screenwriter-wife, Chris (Vicky Krieps). She casts a wary glance at that house’s bedroom—the scene of turbulent marital discord—and suggests, almost seriously, separate rooms?
Since the director’s death in 2007, Fårö has been the site of Bergman Week each June. Hansen-Love drops her narrative into that small-scale tourist mecca for fans of the intellectually, emotionally challenging director—an event that includes a film festival, a yellow “Bergman Safari” tour bus, Bergman trivia nights and showings of the director’s classics in his private screening room. But don’t sit on the first seat in the front row, the projectionist insists. That’s still reserved for Bergman.
Tony is a panelist during Bergman Week and Chris is seeking inspiration for her own screenplay. She finds the calm, spartan environment oppressive at first, but the island has its subtle enchantments. As if mirroring Bergman’s inner landscape, Fårö is a flatland of fields and forests, vaguely autumnal even on a sunny summer afternoon.
Bergman Island unwinds at a leisurely pace. In Hollywood terms, nothing much happens as Chris, the film’s protagonist, ponders how life becomes fiction and fiction becomes life as she conceives a screenplay full of unfulfilled longing across time and distance. She wonders whether she’ll spend her life saying the same things over and over again. Like one of the Bergman’s minor films, Bergman Island is a picture of reflection not action, unmemorable but enjoyable and buoyed by believable performances.
Brilliant observation by Chris after screening Bergman’s Cries and Whispers: the difference between it and a horror film is after leaving the cinema, you know the horror film could never happen to you.
Bergman Island is screening at the Downer Theater.
