A young Parisian filmmaker whose delicately personal work illuminates the unbearable lightness of being with the soft touch of a late summer breeze, Mia Hansen-Løve may not be the first 21st-century auteur who comes to mind when people consider the portentous legacy of Ingmar Bergman, a man whose cinema stared into the void in the hopes of seeing its own reflection, and shouted down God’s silence with such howling rage that even his comedies are probably still echoing in eternity.
And yet, “Bergman Island” — a triple-layered meta-romance about a filmmaker who flies to Sweden with her partner and pitches him a screenplay about her first love — is such a rare and remarkable movie for the very same reason that you wouldn’t expect it to exist in the first place.
Hansen-Løve is enraptured by the immaterial yet utterly transformative effect that Bergman’s cinema has had on the quiet ocean rock where so much of it was made.
Shot in the scope aspect-ratio that its namesake never used, the movie begins as such an airy and lyrical Euro-drama that it’s hard to fathom the meta playfulness to come.
By this point, no one who’s familiar with Hansen-Løve or the personal nature of her previous films will be able to stop themselves from assuming that Chris is her avatar, and that Tony is a stand-in for her famous ex Olivier Assayas, with whom she also shares a young child.
Rolling her eyes at the fact that Bergman had nine children whom he seldom bothered to raise, Chris asks if it’s possible to create a “great body of work and raise a family at the same time,” and it’s not much of a leap to imagine that Hansen-Løve has asked herself the same question, even if Assayas never did.
“Bergman Island” is too knowing and lived-in to make its characters suffer through some big fight, or have them surrender to any of the temptations that casually avail themselves during these languid days of endless sunlight; the idea of their marriage has begun to erode, and there’s no building it back.
Change doesn’t come easy to Hansen-Løve’s characters, whose senses of identity are so anchored to their jobs that they often seem at risk of drowning in their dreams. What separates Chris from the rest — and what invites “Bergman Island” to add a vivid new dimension to Hansen-Løve’s work, building on her previous films without fulfilling Chris’ fear of self-repetition — is that her vocation as an artist is the very thing that sets her free.
And so, as Chris begins to narrate the film within a film to her oblivious partner, we are spirited back and away into “The White Dress,” a Linklater-tinged romantic drama about a New York-based filmmaker named Amy , and Amy fully intends on making the most of it.
“The White Dress” is expertly threaded into the A-plot of “Bergman Island,” and jolts the film alive with a sense of fun and forbidden possibility .
She dances to Abba and skinny dips in the ocean and wonders aloud what might have been if she’d wound up with the one who got away.
Denis Lenoir’s sensitively crisp cinematography helps delineate between the various layers , though it’s hard not to get a bit drunk on the midnight blues that locate Amy’s Fårö in a dusky kind of dreamworld.
“Bergman Island” is a heart-stoppingly poignant stunner all the same — one beating inside a body of work that has always been seasick with the bittersweet vertigo that comes from looking at the past through the smudged lens of memory and imagination.