The Ghosts of Ingmar Bergman

A film about people sitting around obsessing over Ingmar Bergman may sound less than scintillating, but I’d rate Bergman Island a considerable improvement over most Ingmar Bergman movies. (Exceptions: Fanny and Alexander and Smiles of a Summer Night, his two most uncharacteristic efforts.)

The latest from French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve, Bergman Island — which will show at the New York Film Festival ahead of an October 15 theatrical release — is a movie-within-a-movie with a resolution that raises more questions than it answers. So: classic art-house ambiguity that leaves the audience to suss out exactly what has happened, although the possibilities aren’t especially interesting. The film serves as a light, not particularly deep gloss on Bergman, which is amusing because it’s in part a satire of lightweights who have turned the recluse’s remote island of Fårö into a highbrow tourist trap. (For a penetrating consideration of Bergman, the piece to read is this one by Nathan Shields in Commentary, one of the finest pieces of criticism I’ve ever encountered.)

Tim Roth is Tony, a famous filmmaker who comes to Fårö for a film festival and, together with his wife Chris (Vicky Krieps from Phantom Thread), is awarded the honor of staying in one of Bergman’s houses on the island and seeing films in the master’s screening room. Both the utterly self-confident Tony and the hesitant Chris, a struggling writer who finds it excruciating to mine words from her soul, are hoping to be inspired to write films while they’re on the island, which is not an intuitive place for a couple to go. Bergman burned through five wives, with whom he had nine children, and his films may fairly be described as not overstuffed with joy. If you ask me, his work could have used a few ABBA numbers. And, hey, one such hit pops up in this movie! But it’s “The Winner Takes It All.” Which is actually pretty Bergman-y.

While both spouses take independent journeys searching for Bergman — hers is cast as the genuine one, his the shallow tourist version, derived from a silly-looking bus tour called the Bergman Safari — each gets to work on a script. Tony dives into a pretentious-sounding screenplay he won’t discuss. Chris, though, shares with her husband, and us, a scenario that seems to be a refracted image of her own relationship. It’s about a pair of young lovers, Amy (Mia Wasikowska) and Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), who met as teens and broke up but now, in their late 20s, find themselves guests at the same wedding, on Fårö, after each has built a life with another partner and Amy has had a baby with hers. A third or so of Bergman Island is devoted to this nested story, and the point of the movie, such as it is, is to nudge viewers to debate among themselves what Chris really thinks about her life with Tony. Possibly she settled for a second-best relationship and is secretly pining for her own Joseph, maybe even the actor who would play Joseph in her movie. What is real and what is art, eh?

You know that things are going to go a bit wobbly for this amicable but not particularly loving couple about five minutes in, when a guide mentions that the bed they will be sharing is one that Bergman used for the filming of Scenes from a Marriage — “the movie that made millions of couples decide to get divorced.” Nervous laughs all around. Scenes, by the way, a famously depressing 70s series revered by beardy PBS-watching Boomer intellectuals, has been remade and is now streaming as an HBO show. Which serves as official proof that Bergman is having a cultural moment. Must be all the death and plague out there. It’s a shame he didn’t live to see 2021. He would probably have quite enjoyed the endless vistas of worldwide despair.

I doubt he would have enjoyed Bergman Island much, though. To paraphrase a character played by Bergman’s favorite actor, Max von Sydow, in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, “If Ingmar Bergman came back and saw what was going on in his name, he would never stop throwing up.” The movie-within-the-movie isn’t at all Bergman-y; it’s just a routine soapy drama. And the jokey details about how the island has become a tourist attraction for pretentious day-trippers who travel around on their dorkbus and buy designer sunglasses in the gift shop would have made him wretch. He might, however, have liked the hints that his ghost still haunts Fårö, where one seat in his private screening room is reserved for his spirit.

As for Hansen-Løve, her main takeaway from Bergman’s films seems to be a fairly overdone notion that fictional personas can blur excitingly with real ones. Yet Bergman Island most strongly resembles no Bergman movie but rather another Woody Allen film: Stardust Memories, which also takes place at a film festival and contains films nested within it, though in homage not to Bergman but to Federico Fellini. Unlike Stardust Memories, which kept the audience guessing until a final twist that was also a devastatingly effective act of closure, Bergman Island fades into an enigmatic conclusion that does not satisfy. Also, I don’t think Ingmar would have approved of using ABBA.