Legacy of cinema legend haunts ‘Bergman Island’

Above : Vicky Krieps stars in Mia Hansen-Løve’s film “Bergman Island.” (Photo/IFC Films)

Movie review : “Bergman Island,” written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie. Streaming on various sergvices, including Amazon Prime.

One of the ongoing controversies regarding art involves when, or even if, it’s appropriate to judge the work of artists separate from the artists themselves. And I mean those individuals, in whatever field, who have somehow done something that much of the world finds objectionable.

History is full of movie-based examples, from Leni Reifenstahl to Woody Allen. And in her movie “Bergman Island,” filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve offers another, the late Swedish master Ingmar Bergman . Not that Bergman appears in the film. But his presence hovers over it as much as the Chess-playing character of death does in Bergman’s 1957 film “The Seventh Seal.”

That’s partly because the French-born Hansen-Løve has set her film on Sweden’s Fårö Island – Bergman’s longtime home and where he shot six of his features and the 1973 television series “Scenes From a Marriage.” Just as much, though, it’s because Hansen-Løve – in examining the process of how a film is first imagined – delves into the same kinds of conflicting feelings that intrigued, and often bedeviled, Bergman himself.

Our protagonists are Anthony and Chris Sanders (played, respectively, by Tim Roth and German actress Vicky Krieps ). Both are filmmakers, and they’ve chosen to visit Fårö Island on a kind of working holiday.

The better known and presumably more successful Anthony spends his time both confidently outlining his next project and addressing audiences at screenings of his past work. In between, he indulges his wife – and I use that term intentionally – even as he interrupts her to take phone calls.

The calls can’t help but be disruptions, particularly the one that comes in the middle of Chris’ relating the plot of what she hopes will be her next film. It’s hard not to see just how impatient Chris is both with the intrusion and with Anthony’s seeming unwillingness to help her find an ending to her story. Then, too, it’s easy to see why she would be more interested to roam the island, and flirt with, a film student (played by Hampus Nordensen) than to accompany Anthony on a tour of the island called, no joke, a “Bergman Safari.”

This, though, is the point at which “Bergman Island” changes. Instead of a further examination of the couple’s relationship – which begins to resemble the first episode of “Scenes From a Marriage” – we find ourselves inserted into Chris’ very screenplay.

And so now, in this movie within a movie, we watch a young woman named Amy (played by Mia Wasikowska ) who, Chris imagines, also is visiting Fårö Island. She’s ostensibly there to attend the wedding of an old friend but even more so as a convenient way to reconnect, she hopes, with her one-time lover Joseph (played by Anders Danielsen Lie).

Amy’s desire for that reconnection nearly overwhelms her, causing her three-day stay on the island to be a marathon of trying to hunt Joseph down. And even though at one point she succeeds, Joseph’s reluctance to begin again is obvious. Not only is he involved with another woman, just as Amy is involved with another man, but it’s clear that he at least knows any sort of future with Amy is likely to be just a repeat of their troubled past.

This is the story, then, that Chris can’t think of how to end. Eventually, of course, she does figure things out. But then we’re left to wonder what that might mean for her real-life marriage to Anthony.

Which brings us back to Bergman. In one scene, a character at the wedding tells Amy about Bergman the man, the one who is never mentioned on the so-called “Safari.” It’s a tale of a man who had nine children by six different women, who – as he himself admitted – never gave a thought about being an actual father, not to mention a husband. His art was all that mattered.

As she has stated in interviews, Hansen-Løve does indeed use “Bergman Island” as a means of exploring just how a screenplay might take shape. And even if her film has little in common with Bergman’s own filmmaking style, it’s clear that she, too, was inspired by emotions similar to those that both tore at Bergman and yet fueled his desire to create some of the greatest films the world has ever seen.