Mia Hansen-Løve (2021)

A screenwriter and her film-maker partner take up an artist residency on the Baltic island of Fårö, where Ingmar Bergman lived and died, wrote and shot several of his films.  It’s a seemingly idyllic location but Chris (Vicky Krieps) is soon worrying she’ll be unable to write well in this hallowed environment whose creative history casts a long shadow – it’s bound, she tells Tony (Tim Roth), to make you ‘feel like a loser’.  I don’t know if Mia Hansen-Løve was staying on Fårö when she wrote her screenplay for Bergman Island, which is showing at the London Film Festival, but you’re bound to suspect she’s speaking for herself through Chris.  Her film, if it does nothing else, reflects the gulf in film artistry between Bergman and Hansen-Løve.

Chris is inclined to woefulness.  In the opening sequence, on board the plane bringing the couple to the island, she’s hiding her face in Tony’s comforting embrace, insisting that she’ll never fly again.  Shortly after their arrival on Fårö, she’s on the verge of tears as she leaves a voicemail, begging her mother to return her calls.  (She doesn’t get a reply.)  While big-time director Tony is fighting off the attentions of admiring audience members following a Q&A, Chris is elsewhere, making the acquaintance of Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), a mildly geeky student film-maker with relatives on Fåro.  He introduces Chris to off-the-beaten-track places of interest while Tony goes on the ‘Bergman Safari’, a conducted tour of better-known ones.  Chris, as she predicted, doesn’t seem to get much writing done but approaching the halfway mark in Bergman Island, she regales Tony with the outline that she’s managed to come up with.

From this point on, most of the action on screen comprises the story that Chris is struggling to invent.  The ‘outline’ she describes to Tony is, needless to say, a fully realised film – one nearly as listless as the narrative of Chris drifting around the island has been.  This film-within-the-film is also set on Fårö, where Amy (Mia Wasikowska) is attending the wedding of a friend, Nicolette (Clara Strauch).  The other guests include an old flame of Amy’s, Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie).  The rekindled flame is eventually extinguished by Joseph’s departure.  Hansen-Løve occasionally cuts back to Chris describing the scenario to Tony; you can hardly blame him for failing to come up with much in response.  The best encouragement he can offer Chris is that her Amy story takes place over a period of three days – ‘you’ve not tried that before’.

As Bergman Island enters its closing stages, the personnel of the inner and outer narratives superficially intersect:  Chris is shown directing a film whose cast includes the actors playing not only Amy and Joseph but Hampus too.  It’s a predictable depiction of the ideas and connections brewing inside Chris’s head – and confirmation of the limited imagination of her creator.  When she phones her mother early on, Chris is anxious to know how ‘June’ is; Tony is able to reassure her with a video on his phone that Chris’s mother has sent to him (‘I’m her favourite’).  I wondered if June was a little girl or a pet animal – it seems an odd name for either in this day and age – until it’s revealed that Amy has a four-year-old daughter (off screen):  it seemed a safe bet that this child was inspired by Chris’s own and the film ends with Tony bringing June (Grace Delrue) to Fårö.  There’s an ecstatic reunion between her and Chris.  I suppose it’s a mercy that Hansen-Løve doesn’t show the daughter’s arrival giving the mother an instant creative fillip.

Vicky Krieps, who made such a good impression in Phantom Thread (2017), isn’t able to energise Chris:  she hardly has the material to do so but Bergman Island left me questioning if Krieps is a sufficiently strong presence for a lead role.  I hadn’t seen Mia Wasikowska for some time (not since Maps to the Stars (2014), although she’s done things since).  Wasikowska is a lead actress and, at least for a while, gives her part of the film a distinct emotional centre but the material isn’t worthy of her.  Anders Danielsen Lie makes it hard to see why Amy still finds creepy Joseph irresistible.  As far as the performances are concerned, Bergman Island would be a very poor show without Tim Roth’s laconic, unsentimental Tony.  Roth brings wit and sorely-needed changes of tempo to proceedings.

Although I was keen to see Krieps’ and Wasikowska’s latest work, I bought a ticket for Bergman Island principally because of the name in the title.  Getting bored and irritated by the film probably serves me right, though Mia Hansen-Løve seems to be largely playing to, and indulging, Bergman aficionados.  She lightly satirises the Bergman industry on Fårö – in the spiel of the Safari guide, mention of a Bergman-themed quiz night for the tourists, and so on.  But frequent references to the oeuvre are designed to tickle Bergmaniacs in the audience:  some of the laughter in NFT1 had the emphatic quality of cognoscenti wanting to make clear they got the joke (but perhaps their neighbours in the audience didn’t, ho-ho …)   Nearly all the Bergman-specific lines feel dropped into the script rather than convincingly connected to the character who delivers them.

A welcome exception occurs in a tetchy conversation between Amy and Jonas (Joel Spira), Nicolette’s husband-to-be, at a gathering on the eve of the wedding.  You feel the force of Jonas’s animus as he derides Bergman for extricating himself from military service during World War II on account of his ‘demons’, aka stomach ulcers:  ‘Sweden was neutral, for God’s sake!’, fulminates Jonas.  He’s a Fårö native; miffed Bergman fan Amy asks if he ever met the Great Man.  Jonas didn’t but his grandparents regularly did, when they were supermarket shopping:  ‘They said he was most unpleasant’.  ‘Perhaps he just didn’t like shopping in supermarkets’, Amy replies before stomping off petulantly.  There’s an authenticity to Jonas’s outburst that’s wholly absent from, say, the dim questions that Chris asks when she and Tony are introduced to the director of the Bergman Foundation on Fårö.  Did Bergman believe in God?  Did he have good relationships with his children?  The Foundation director is too polite to yawn.

Hansen-Løve’s inability or refusal to develop a clear picture of what Bergman means to Chris almost guarantees the superficiality of Bergman Island.   There are other, incidental things that don’t add up.  When Chris doesn’t show for the Bergman Safari and Tony has to go it alone, he’s reduced to just another member of the coach party:  no one appears to recognise the feted international film-maker we saw at the Q&A a few screen minutes previously.  I guess it’s possible Hansen-Løve means to convey that the tourists only have eyes for Bergman; it’s more likely she just wanted to show Tony’s sizeable ego on the receiving end of things for once.  The cinematographer Denis Lenoir certainly brings out the beauties of the Fårö land-and-seascape.  There’s agreeable, vaguely Celtic music on the soundtrack.  There is interest, of course, in being shown key Bergman locations on the island.  But these are nowhere near enough to sustain a feature-length drama as undernourished as this one.

8 October 2021