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 through Chris 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.
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