On paper, Bergman Island could easily be mistaken for the most arthouse film ever made. A filmmaking couple arrive for a screenwriting session at the home of cinema’s doom-monger-in-chief, Ingmar Bergman, causing a crisis of confidence in their relationship. Throw in a meta film-within-a-film and, for all the world, it sounds like it can only be enjoyed along with a furrowed brow, a black polo neck and a nut roast. Instead, in her first film in the English language, French director Mia Hansen-Løve — always the most human of filmmakers — has no truck with Scandi angst and paranoia, mounting a warm, beguiling. breezy exploration of a diffident artist looking to find her voice.
The island of the title is the mythical Fårö, Bergman’s home and workplace since the ’60s. Into the striking landscape come filmmakers Chris (Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, replacing Greta Gerwig, who jumped ship to make Little Women) and Tony (Tim Roth). Drawing on Hansen-Løve’s own 15-year union with renowned French director Olivier Assayas, Chris is an upcoming, still-unsure-of-herself writer-director married to the older, more vaunted Tony. The latter has been invited to screen his latest film and takes in all the Bergman-esque goodness the island has to offer. Chris, meanwhile, feels the spectre of the auteur weighing down on her (“Writing here, how can I not feel like a loser?”) and, eschewing the organised Bergman “safari”, bonds with a Fårö expert (Hampus Nordenson).
Hansen-Løve’s empathy from behind the camera is palpable.
Hansen-Løve draws droll comic relief from the Bergman oeuvre (asking to screen a comedy, Chris and Tony are lumbered with cancer drama Cries And Whispers), but you don’t have to be a Bergo-phile to get it. Instead, his work is the jumping-off point for an incisive portrait not only of a faltering couple, but also of creativity within a relationship. During a discussion about Bergman having nine kids but being an absent parent, Chris questions the possibility of a woman ever having a substantial body of work and still raising kids. Hansen-Løve’s empathy from behind the camera is palpable.
Around halfway through, Chris pitches her script to Tony and her story becomes the movie. A Linklater-esque indie flick, ‘The White Dress’ follows Amy (Mia Wasikowska), a New York-based filmmaker, who, leaving her child behind, travels to Fårö for a friend’s wedding and re-connects with Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), her first love, who provided the inspiration for her debut film. At times it purposely feels like a stuttering first draft being worked through, but is given life by Wasikowska, be it frolicking in the sea or cutting loose to ‘Dancing Queen’.
It’s not as complete and coherent as Hansen-Løve’s best (see Goodbye First Love, Eden, Things To Come), but still has a magic all its own. It has the energy of a smile on a summer night, wistful, delicate, deceptively simple on top with lots going on underneath. This summer, there really is only one Løve island to visit.