Bergman Island

Where better to write a screenplay than on Fårö, the “Bergman Island” that once served as a refuge for the world-famous director? Or so you might think - at least that's what writers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) think. The filmmaking couple not only want to spend the summer on the sun-drenched island bathed by the dark blue Baltic Sea, but also write their new screenplays inspired by the Swedish directing legend. After all, Ingmar Bergman created masterpieces such as “Persona” and “As in a Mirror” here. To this end, the couple take up residence in a bright and airy country house, in whose bedroom “Scenes from a Marriage” was filmed. But while Tony, long since a celebrated director, makes rapid progress with his work, his girlfriend, 25 years his junior, struggles with her writer's block. Doubts about herself and her story put a strain on the relationship. Chris begins to take refuge in her screenplay, which takes shape around a young woman named Amy (Mia Wasikowska) and her reunion with her first great love - and becomes a movie in itself. Slowly, the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to blur... In “Bergman Island”, her seventh feature film, Mia Hansen-Løve (“Eden”) not only draws on several narrative levels. Her own reality is also reflected in this film, which fits perfectly into a body of work that Hansen-Løve herself once described as semi-autobiographical. The director has been living with French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Personal Shopper”), who is 26 years her senior, since 2001. She also traveled to Fårö several times in 2015. Not only Tony and Chris, but also this film follows Bergman's footsteps very closely and becomes a clever cinephile game of cross-references - and a homage to the great Ingmar Bergman! “Thanks to the wonderful performance by Vicky Krieps, who once again proves her world class, Chris' doubts about her artistic abilities as well as about the relationship create an inner tension, which then suddenly shifts into a movie-within-a-movie plot. For when she finally begins to conceive an initial film idea and tells Tony about it, this narrated plot with another pair of lovers simply seems to hijack the film: now we see Mia Wasikowska coming to Fårö from the USA for a wedding celebration and meeting her tragic childhood sweetheart again. In this secondary story, Mia Hansen-Løve also explores the everyday abysses of passion, grief and the many unnamable emotional states in between. And yet the production retains a remarkable lightness even in very emotional areas, for example when Wasikowska starts dancing to ABBA's “The Winner Takes It All” late at night at the wedding reception. Again and again, the tongue-in-cheek humor ensures that this interplay of levels of reality and reflection between biographical references, a real location with legendary heritage and doubly interlaced fiction never seems pretentious. For example, the Wasikowska story has already been completely abandoned when at some point a cell phone ringing in the external plot harshly interrupts the film within the film and reminds us which story is the “real” one here. What could easily have turned into an over-constructed conundrum becomes a wonderfully elegant, subtle study of the relationship between life and art in Mia Hansen-Løve's very grounded narrative style.” (Patrick Seyboth, at epd-film.de)