Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021) (Patreon)

"Why didn't Bergman make films about happiness?" wonders Chris (Vicky Krieps) to her husband Anthony (Tim Roth). Although Hansen-Løve takes her time clarifying exactly what we're watching, we eventually discover that this is an aesthetic debate between two film directors who are in love. And while Bergman Island is not a uniformly upbeat film by any means, it does suggest that the beauty all around us is perhaps more worthy of scrutiny than the psychological dramas upon which we tend to fixate, both in life and in the cinema.

The couple are seen arriving on the Swedish island of Fårö, where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked throughout much of his career. They are both at work on new projects and have accepted a residency sponsored by the Bergman Foundation, allowing them to write and plan their respective next films. Anthony is working on a thriller of some sort, and based on the journal sketches Chris discovers in his absence, the film seems at least partially centered on questions of BDSM and violence against women. We don't learn a great deal about Anthony as an artist, partly because Hansen-Løve is more focused on Chris's creative process. But it's also a strategic form of withholding, suggesting that a man making a movie about women in bondage is nothing particularly noteworthy, and further elaboration is unnecessary.

Chris's film, by contrast, is extensively depicted onscreen in the second half of Bergman Island. She is describing the work in progress to Anthony, and this permits Hansen-Løve to apply some meta-textual mojo, bringing the viewer right inside the film-to-be while also keeping us at a critical distance. This project, called The White Dress, stars Mia Wasikowska as Amy, a woman who has come to Fårö to attend a friend's wedding. This reunites her with the great love of her life, Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), with whom she's carried on a long-term affair, despite their commitments to other partners.

Prior to Hansen-Løve's deep dive into Chris's film, Bergman Island is a strangely direct, unadorned consideration of the power of artistic influence. On Fårö, there is a Bergman festival, a "Bergman Safari" that buses visitors around the island to view notable locations from Bergman's films, and in the next-to-last scene we see Chris filming part of The White Dress in Bergman's own home office. The two halves of the film are connected by the basic idea of "entering" a cinematic work. Being on Fårö is, by the foundation's design, like walking right into Bergman's oeuvre. (Anthony and Chris are staying in the house where Bergman shot Scenes From a Marriage, and Hansen-Løve recreates the bedroom shot with Krieps and Roth standing in for Ullmann and Josephson.) And eventually, Chris's encounters on the island help to clarify for her what her own cinematic world might look like.

There's something oddly essayistic about Bergman Island. Some will undoubtedly find it irritatingly insular. Many films have been made about the fraught relationship between cinema and real life, but Hansen-Løve has staked everything on Ingmar Bergman as a test case, an exemplar of masculine modernism's failure to embrace the ordinary. In an early scene, Chris is having a polite argument with Anthony and three members of the foundation, about whether Bergman's failures as a father could or should be excused in light of the art he produced. This is a lingering question throughout the film, given the fact that every location, every object, connected to Bergman has been transformed into a monument, a set of preserved spaces where living beings can enter but that support no actual life 

These are problems Hansen-Løve has explored before, most notably in The Father of My Children, in which a man's failure as a film producer leads to his suicide, and the abandonment of his wife and family. But it hardly seems a stretch to detect a self-interrogation in Bergman Island. Like Chris, Hansen-Løve is a filmmaker and a mother, and the former partner of Olivier Assayas. Not only does this film share certain thematic affinities with Assayas's own Summer Hours (the life and afterlife of artistic artifacts); it suggests that a woman artist can find herself in a difficult position with regard to these questions. Across history, men have detached from life in order to make art, an option that women are seldom permitted to take. But Bergman Island suggests that these strictures have given women a unique clarity of vision, recognizing this false dichotomy as an impoverishment of both art and life.