113 min | R | October 15, 2021 | IFC Films
Two filmmakers married to each other retreat to the island where Ingmar Bergman made his masterpieces. He worships the ghost and basks in the pilgrimage. She tries to write in its shadow and discovers her own movie staring back.
Chris and Tony are filmmakers married to each other. They travel to Fårö, the Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot his films. Tony works on his screenplay and soaks in the pilgrimage. Chris cannot write. As she walks the island and absorbs its quiet, the screenplay she is struggling to finish starts to take shape on screen as its own film. Bergman Island is about a woman trying to make art in the shadow of a master and inside a marriage that quietly leaves her alone with the work.
Vicky Krieps plays Chris with restless attention. She watches everything and commits to nothing on the page. Krieps keeps the frustration under a pleasant surface and never lets it spill into melodrama. Tim Roth plays Tony as a man comfortable in his success and oblivious to the distance it creates between them. Mia Wasikowska plays Amy, the heroine of Chris’s screenplay, with an ache that mirrors her author. Anders Danielsen Lie plays Joseph, Amy’s old love, with the gentle evasiveness of a man who refuses to choose.
Mia Hansen-Løve writes and directs without underlining a single idea. She films Fårö in flat northern daylight that strips the locations of any romance. The island looks ordinary, which is the point. When Chris’s screenplay takes over, Hansen-Løve makes no announcement and stages no dream-sequence trickery. She lets the second film begin and trusts the audience to feel the boundary dissolve. The two layers eventually share the same frame, and the editing refuses to tell us which one is real.
Bergman Island is a film about the gap between the artist you worship and the life you actually live. Chris comes to Fårö looking for Bergman and finds her own unfinished work waiting. Hansen-Løve treats creativity as labor rather than inspiration and shows the cost it extracts from the people around it. The film moves at the pace of a vacation and hides its ambition inside small talk and bicycle rides. It earns its quiet because every calm surface covers a question it declines to settle.