Reviewed by Hannah Spencer.
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve, Umbrella Entertainment, 2021, M, 172mins.
Beguiling and earnest, Bergman Island is a meditation on relationships and the creative process.
Chris (Vicky Krieps, Phantom Thread) and her partner Tony (Tim Roth, The Hateful Eight) leave their daughter at home and journey to the remote and ruggedly beautiful island of Fårö, Sweden where legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman lived and worked.
Both filmmakers, Tony has already achieved success while the younger Chris battles writer’s block.
The island is steeped in Bergman history and the pragmatic Tony works efficiently on his new film in their new abode.
However, the inescapable shadow of Bergman’s greatness stalls Chris’s create process even further.
She finds writing to be a “self-inflicted agony” while also wondering if it is possible to create a great body of work whilst raising a family.
Tony suggests she do something else, perhaps be a housewife.
Chris narrates her budding screenplay which plays out as a film-within-a-film, sliding deftly between fiction and apparent reality.
The screenplay focuses on Amy (Australian Mia Wasikowska, Alice in Wonderland), a young mother and filmmaker who also journeys to the island of Fårö and is reunited with a past love.
She is overwhelmed with the passion of her past love and what could have been.
The similarities between Chris and her character Amy are clear, but Chris is also a thinly veiled portrait of director Mia Hansen-Løve and her ex-partner the successful director Olivier Assayas with whom she shares a child.
A portrait within a portrait, that plays with the blurry lines between fiction and real life.
Mia Hansen-Løve has spent extensive time on Fårö.
The island, and Bergman’s legacy is an ever-present character in the movie, but Hansen-Løve’s sincere, quietly mesmerizing film is wholly her own.
4 out of 5 stars
Screening nationally at selected theatres.
