Rent Bergman Island (2021)

Lovely island, poor film - Bergman Island review by JR

As a travelogue of the Swedish island of Faro, the film is stunning, and will have you planning your next summer holiday there. But the rest is long and boring. It is the navel gazing of wealthy film creatives with nothing to say about life outside their privileged bubble. There is a film within a film which is even more pointless than the main one. Bergman would turn in his grave at this.

Subtle narrative of life and art - Bergman Island review by PD

Mia Hansen-Løve’s eighth feature is at once a love-letter to the Swedish master director and a delicate study of the complexities of relationships, the creative process, and the ways that one invariably influences the other. Meanwhile, the island, as the film captures it, has become a kind of Ingmar Bergman theme park, replete with bus tours, lectures, a preservation foundation, and a general vibe of the place as a national treasure and tourist attraction.

It concerns filmmaker Chris (Vicky Krieps) and husband Tony (Tim Roth) who arrive on Fårö – nicknamed ‘Bergman Island’ for the director’s long-time residency there – as a writing retreat. The couple, amicable and affectionate with each other, branch off to do their own things. Chris is working on her screenplay while Tony hosts a directing masterclass and a screening of one of his films at the Bergman Centre. The film’s early sequences are a relaxed first act, the relaxed tone never threatening to tip over into disharmony despite the tensions between the couple - Chris’ discovery of Tony’s notebook, for example, full of fetishised sketches of women, is a discovery that is neither resolved nor repressed. However, it’s in the second act, where Bergman Island moves into a film-within-a-film drawn from Chris’ draft script, that Hansen-Løve shifts into the overtly psychological, and untended desires rise to the surface, specifically, a student with whom Chris has made a connection appearing as a minor character, while the fictional Amy (a very good Mia Wasikowska), and first love Joseph briefly rekindle an old romance under the noses of their current partners.

It's possibly too subtle and a bit too earnest overall, and all the things such a film might portray as issues between Chris and Tony — artistic rivalry, adulterous leanings, his arrogance, her withdrawal - are hinted at and then all-too quickly passed over. However, Hansen-Løve deliberately resists the Swedish director’s darkness, and there's plenty to admire en route - for example in a scene where Bergman's treatment of women in real life is pointed out as significantly less than admirable, or, by contrast, when a smug male student who declares his disdain of Bergman to a wearied Amy is given short shrift, suggesting that admiration of a text needn’t presuppose approval of the author. Ultimately, Hansen-Løve suggests that life may well imitate art but one needn’t define the other, and there's a final last-act twist which is very effective. Well worth a look for those with patience.

Interesting Relationship Drama - Bergman Island review by GI

A serious and well intended romance/relationship drama that has an interesting narrative structure and a sincere elegance but lacks the passion needed to really light it up. It follows couple, Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps), a film director and his screenwriter partner, who travel to the Swedish island of Fårö, the home of famed film director Ingmar Bergman where his home is preserved and there is a museum and tours showing the locations used in his movies. Chris is eager to share her ideas for a new script but Tony is distracted and this is having an affect on Chris' and her relationship with him. Eventually Tony agrees to hear her new story which is then shown as a romantic film within a film story about two former lovers who reunite at a wedding where they are guests. This is the more interesting part of the film as we follow Amy (Mia Wasikowski), who becomes besotted by Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie). The imaginary drama is clearly linked with Chris' own feelings. Overall the film just starts to become a little tedious when it perks back up in the central sequence. It's watchable and Wasikowski is excellent but I felt that Roth was a little miscast here and played Tony as too distant. This is a film with much going for it but ultimately it's a little too empty and unrewarding.