Film review: Bergman Island is a slow-burning exploration of a relationship fraying at the seams
Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth star as Chris and Tony
★★★★☆
Bergman Island (15A) stars Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth as Chris and Tony, a married couple who go on a retreat to the idyllic Baltic island of Fårö to work on their respective screenwriting projects. It’s a bold move: Chris and Tony aren’t just tempting fate by attempting to write on the island where the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman made his home, and where he shot several of his films, they’re also staying in the very house where Bergman shot , the film ‘which caused millions of people to get divorced'.
Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, is a slow-burning exploration of a relationship fraying at the seams. After years together, Chris and Tony have become sloppily comfortable in their marriage, with neither prepared to acknowledge their gradual drifting apart.
Relocating to Fårö and writing in Ingmar Bergman’s shadow brings their differences into sharp focus, however: while Tony is cavalier in applauding Bergman’s ruthlessly single-minded approach to creativity, Chris believes that there are more important things in life — being a responsible parent, for example — than being an artist. Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth work brilliantly together as the unsettled couple, with Krieps particularly good as a woman experiencing the profound but inexpressible shock of having to recalibrate her marriage and her life.
Things get deliciously complicated, meanwhile, when Chris begins telling Tony her idea for her screenplay, which features a young woman, Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who is also a filmmaker questioning her life’s decisions. It’s a film-within-a-film-within-a-film, but Mia Hansen-Løve’s script isn’t simply a clever homage to Ingmar Bergman and the power of film, but an emotionally charged journey of self-discovery.
(cinema release)
