Mia Hansen-Løve has created a weightless monument to the Swedish master director with her feature film “Bergman’s Island”.
Anyone looking for contact with the most important Swedish film and theater maker during their lifetime only needed a simple address: “Ingmar Bergman, Fårö, Sweden”. After all, only about 500 people lived on the small island. Today Bergman’s adopted home, which he fell in love with while working on his film “Like in a Mirror”, is an open-air museum for fans from all over the world. As he decreed in his will, artists, authors and scientists can apply to a foundation to develop their own projects in their houses.
It is known that Bergman believed in the presence of ghosts, especially by his fifth wife Ingrid von Rosen, who died in 1995. He felt surrounded on the island even after her death. It is quite possible that he hoped to act as a spirit on those present after his death.
In her feature film “Bergman’s Island”, the French director Mia Hansen-Løve lets him wander invisibly through every scene. A filmmaker couple (played by Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth) visits the island for a creative stay. But even the friendly briefing by a foundation employee cannot do without a nasty shadow: “This is her bedroom, here Bergman shot ‘Scenes from a Marriage’.” The film that resulted in millions of people getting divorced. “
In fact, the couple’s happiness seems to be on feet of clay, their relationship to their own creativity is too different. While Tony, a good two decades older, shakes his film projects lightly out of his sleeve, Chris approaches his own ideas with curiosity and doubts. That may also be due to the fact that they are at home in different types of cinema: he in tangible genre cinema, as a short excerpt suggests, she is working on a psychological relationship story that will soon also take shape as a film in the film. As she explores the island, she invents a younger alter ego (Mia Wasikowska) who roams the same places in her own film history.
It is above all Bergman’s mastery in visualizing the unconscious that Mia Hansen-Løve has taken as a model. But this cinematic homage does not fall silent in respect: the semi-documentary scenes from Ingmar Bergman’s environment are no more dominant than a primed screen. This incomparable filmmaker dabs her feather-light relationship piece about creative differences. Designed to be completely pathos-free, it is purest anti-Bergman – only gradually (and then very Bergman-like) to play with dreams and reality.
The project the young filmmaker tells her partner about is the film adaptation of her childhood sweetheart. But as if this very private film material did not offer enough material for discussion for scenes of an artist marriage, the fresh impressions and encounters mix with the memories. Is the painful separation that her alter ego lets her go through just the premonition of an approaching separation in the present?
When has one ever seen such an unpretentious homage to an otherwise unattainable artist? Once the camera glides briefly through Bergman’s private video library, which also had space for the most popular genres (among other things, he was a fan of the series “Dallas”). There is no question that Bergman would not have missed this amazing cross between “The Smile of a Summer Night” and an inconspicuous French country house film. And probably he could have been just as enthusiastic about Tony’s massive genre cinema as he was about Chris’ delicate farewell drama.
What Mia Hansen-Løve did not want or could not compete with the great Swede, however, is the depth of his psychological conflicts, the severity of his dramas – Bergman’s real greatness. But maybe as a weightless spirit one looks at life a little more gently.
The nicest thing about this film is its impartiality towards such an oversized legacy – without even wanting to knock it off its pedestal. There is a lot that can be criticized about Ingmar Bergman, which is also reflected in the semi-documentary scenes – especially when it comes to dealing with his family and the artistic staff. It is possible that one will soon see his films differently in the knowledge of some of the wounds that surrounded them.
Perhaps this is exactly where the future of cinephilia lies: not in working through a museum canon of masterpieces that you respectfully watch as you age. But in tracing their artistic uniqueness. All film museums should be creative islands, protection zones like “Bergman’s Island”.
Bergman’s Island . F / S / B / D 2021. Director: Mia Hansen-Løve. 105 Min.
