Bergman Island enters deep waters

Bergman Island refers to Fårö, the 43 square kilometers of land off the Swedish coast, where the legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman lived and worked. In the wake of Bergman’s death, Fårö has become both a tourist attraction and a popular holiday destination for artists seeking fresh inspiration. In Mia Hansen-Løve’s film, which starred in competition at Cannes earlier this year, it is a place bordering on the magical, a place of romantic and spiritual renewal.

Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) are a married couple retiring to Bergman Island in the summer. They drift apart. He is a skilled filmmaker who pays only the slightest attention to his wife’s artistic endeavors without any interest in collaborating with her. He also experiences a kind of sexual crisis, disturbing evidence of which Chris discovers in his magazines. While Tony goes on a guided Bergman safari, Chris wanders off and meets Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), a young film student whose conversation seems to revive her creatively. She returns with the idea for a story that she begins to tell to her husband.

At this point, the film makes a bold narrative digression as we watch Chris’ story come to life. Amy (Mia Wasikowska) visits Fårö for a wedding and hopes to revive a romance with Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), an old girlfriend. Also they seem to fall under the enchantment of the island and confess their deepest longings towards each other. Does Chris simply retell a chapter in her own life, the way Bergman imaginatively fed on his childhood for his fictions? Or do Amy and Joseph live real people on the island? Hansen-Løve’s instructor wisdom keeps the answers to these questions ambiguously ambiguous. There is a relaxed, sensual clarity in the image flow, and the film makes excellent use of several beautiful string pieces by Robin Williamson, one of the founders of The Incredible String Band. The spiritual intensity that nourished Bergman’s own art is replaced here by a cool, searching curiosity.

Of the quartet of actors who inhabit these mirrored roles, Kripes brings a fine-legged fragility to a part originally intended for Greta Gerwig. But the real star is of course the independent island with its bursting heaths and dazzling beaches. Bergman believed in ghosts (or so a character tells us) and Bergman’s spirit seems to haunt the film itself; the theater, which Chris and Tony visit, reserves an empty seat in the front row for the deceased director.

His death also left a gap that has not yet been filled. When asked about the questions that burned in Bergman’s soul (“Oh, God! Why did you leave me?”) The film student shrugs his shoulders and says, “No one in Sweden cares anymore.” In this telling exchange, Hansen-Løve finds fault with the postmodern society’s lack of faith. Bergman Island recognizes the spiritual maelstrom that Bergman weathered – and worked so hard in his cinema – as evidence of a well-researched and truly lived life. The island testifies to this will.