Bergman Island: Form and Feeling

Part of the thrill of Bergman Island is that we see Fårö as seen by Bergman as seen by Hansen-Løve, so that the objects Chris and Tony encounter are refracted through layers of narrative. The couple’s relationship is warm and affectionately ironic, though it betrays the chasm—the impregnable solitude—that always separates two artists from each other. (Both Krieps and Roth embody this alone-togetherness with a marvelous mix of openness and mystery.) Chris is frustrated at Tony’s secretiveness about his work, the ease with which he seems to access inspiration, and the BDSM drawings she finds in his notebook; he is miffed at her when she stands him up for the Bergman Safari to go on a private excursion with a local film student. Is their relationship indeed an echo of Hansen-Løve and Assayas’s, or might it be gaining the contours of Johan and Marianne’s in Scenes from a Marriage? Or maybe their companionship is meant to resemble that of Bergman and his fourth wife, Käbi Laretei, whose piano sits in the house they stay in; or perhaps that of Bergman and his beloved fifth and final wife, Ingrid von Rosen, whose grave Chris visits. At one point in the film, Chris sets out looking for the house from Through a Glass Darkly only to find nothing—not even the facade, which, she later learns, was the only part that was built. Her fool’s errand is a cautionary tale about cinema’s alchemical powers to give tangible form to feeling, powers that Chris wrestles with as she writes her own script.

Shooting Fårö in an anamorphic-widescreen format that Bergman never used—and in bright, sun-rich colors that look nothing like the Swede’s frigid visions—Hansen-Løve engineers a kind of exorcism, dispossessing the debris of Bergman’s life and art of their symbolic specters. Yet some ghosts linger. During lunch at the Bergman Center, Chris learns that Bergman had nine children with six women (among many other affairs) and was a negligent father. “Do you think you can create a great body of work and raise a family at the same time?” Chris wonders aloud. On one level, her question is about the permissibilities for male and female artists, and the head of the Bergman Center responds flatly that “a woman couldn’t have done the same thing.” But as Chris continues to press Tony on this fact—given that, she adds, “you like him so much”—her questions belie a more self-critical discontent. “I like a certain coherence,” she says eventually. “I don’t like when the artists I love don’t behave well in real life.” The rub lies not in Bergman’s inconsistencies—as another companion notes, the filmmaker was as cruel in his life as in his films—but in Chris’s own; she is unsettled by the contradictions implied by her love for him. She feels similarly troubled by the realization—triggered after watching Cries and Whispers—that Bergman’s movies “hurt” her, yet she loves them. She just doesn’t know why.

Hansen-Løve once told me that the whole point of filmmaking, for her, is to find a way to do two potentially contradictory things at the same time: to represent life as it is, and to make films that “help me to live.” Though often freighted by loss and bereavement, her movies ground themselves in optimism by taking the long view. They typically traverse multiple years, dropping us in and out of tragedies as well as levities, so that life feels promisingly unfinalized, no matter what has transpired. In Bergman Island, we witness, in action, the reconciliation of reality and desire—so central to Hansen-Løve’s artistic ethos—that contrives this hopeful futurity. On a stroll around the island, as Chris tells Tony about the script she’s working on, called The White Dress, we see the film play out on-screen. The story involves Amy (Mia Wasikowska) and Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), who first met as teenagers, fell in love, and separated, before meeting again as young adults, falling in love again, and separating again. Amy is now a twenty-eight-year-old filmmaker living in America with a partner and child, and Joseph lives in Norway with his wife. They reunite again on Fårö while attending a friend’s wedding, but after a couple of nights of passion, Joseph has reservations and grows distant.