No apparitions are glimpsed or heard in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, but it isn’t too far off base to describe this story about a filmmaking couple, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who make a pilgrimage to the island of Fårö, where Ingmar Bergman lived for many years, as a ghost story. As mentioned by more than one island resident, Bergman came to fervently believe in ghosts toward the end of his life, and even if the Swedish auteur’s reedy figure never appears trailed by a wisp of ectoplasm, it’s clear that his spirit still haunts his old island home, as well as the lives of Hansen-Løve’s characters.
One of the questions posed by the film is the meaning of Bergman to women filmmakers and dramatists. Bergman was married four times, had nine children by six different women, and famously neglected those children to the extent that some didn’t even know he was their father until a family reunion when the man was 60. During a dinner with several individuals whose careers are devoted to keeping Bergman’s legacy alive, it’s agreed that a woman would not have been able to have his career, though Chris is much less resigned to this reality than Hedda (Kerstin Brunnberg), the head of the Bergman Foundation.
Chris has come with Tony to Bergman’s former home and studio as part of a fellowship program. Both are hoping to use their time on Fårö the sunny isle in the Baltic Sea to find inspiration for their respective next projects. Like so many things in Bergman Island, the relationship between the two is less clear than it appears at first glance. A prologue shows Chris with her head between her legs on a shuddering airplane, fretting out loud about what will happen to their children, with Tony embracing and comforting her. But once on the sunny island in the Baltic Sea, she describes him to others as her friend and the two never get physically intimate, even though they share the lived-in familiarity of longtime lovers and Tony acts surprised when she decides to sleep in a different cabin than him.
It takes some time to recognize how purposefully undefined Hansen-Løve is leaving things, and by that point a surprising switch is flipped in the film. Chris begins pitching her project in development to Tony, and suddenly we’ve entered a film within a film, with Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie taking over the lead roles as two lovers, Amy and Joseph, whose affair is coming to the end in Chris’s prospective romantic drama, also set on Färo.
Bergman Island uses this framing device to think about women’s artistic creation in a field where most acknowledged geniuses of the form have been men. Hansen-Løve presents two versions of Färo, each haunted by a different Bergman, the artist who crafted some of the 20th century’s most memorable depictions of women in the throes of existential and romantic doubt, and the man who took full advantage of his privileged position. Re-inflecting a reaction we heard Chris give earlier to the facts about Bergman’s children, Amy doesn’t think it should be odd that she’d like to have a child both by her longtime boyfriend and her longtime lover.
Given how directly Chris refracts her experiences on Färo into the fiction that she’s constructing, the middle stretch of Bergman Island can feel a little redundant as it progresses. However, Hansen-Løve is merely setting up a finale, deceptively titled an “epilogue,” that brings the various threads about ghosts, relationships, art, and gender to a head, without sacrificing all the alluring ambiguities she’s built up to this point. Ultimately, her film suggests that there’s a way to reconcile oneself with the ghosts of cinema past.
Image/Sound
Bergman Island takes full advantage of the natural light that graces Fårö Island through the long summer months, and the 2K digital master that the Criterion Collection has transferred to Blu-ray retains the film’s bright, warm, yet naturalistic colors and skin tones. Meanwhile, the image definition is flawless and grain distribution is tight and even. The 5.1 surround audio is also quite robust, with the near-constant ambient soundscapes of birds chirping, gusts of wind, and waves crashing in the distance perfectly balanced in the mix.
Extras
A pair of interviews are the only substantial extras on this disc. In the first, Mia Hansen-Løve opens up about her relationship to Bergman’s films throughout her life and how the Fårö Island depicted in his work and the one she filmed on are so different from one another. She also discusses the casting issues that arose following Greta Gerwig and John Turturro’s simultaneous exit from the film and how the first stretch of shooting with Vicky Krieps, before Tim Roth was even cast, created its own challenges and rewards. In her interview, Krieps also discusses the unusual shooting process and how it affected her process and also touches on how Hansen-Løve and Roth’s conflicting approaches affected her performance. The final extra on disc is filmmaker Gabe Klinger’s experimental four-minute behind-the-scenes short Bergman’s Ghosts, which includes Hansen-Løve briefly talking about her stylistic approach to the film. Lastly, the foldout booklet comes with a lovely essay by critic Devika Girish, who both contextualizes Bergman Island within Hansen-Løve’s filmography and expounds on its distinctive qualities.
Overall
Criterion’s release is light on extras, but the gorgeous transfer and a pair of illuminating interviews make it a worthy first entry for Hansen-Løve into the collection.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
