Bergman Island

Bergman Island (2021) is an intricate refutation of the esthetics of the great Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman.  Most of the film exudes the ambience of a TV series directed by Lena Dunham.  Viewers will be divided, I think, as to whether Lena Dunham represents an advance over the dour sensibility of the famous Swede.  But the argument is surely worth making and there is a reasonable feminist argument for the notion that Bergman's male rage motivates masterpieces that, nonetheless, must be overcome and, if not surpassed, at least, contested.  On the basis of age and gender, I am of the party of Bergman, but there is something admirable about the attempt to replace him with more humane esthetic principles -- I just wish that the movie making these arguments were better.  But, again, this is a male disposition tied to the sensibilities of my generation -- Bergman made colossal declarations in an aggressively solemn style; one doesn't contradict Bergman by making an equally aggressive counterargument.  Rather, the arguably pernicious influence of Bergman is most effectively undercut by movie-making that is slight, unassuming, comical, even, a bit twee.

A male filmmaker of some note, Tony (Tim Roth). travels with his German girlfriend, Kris, to Faro Island, an idyllic place in the Baltic Sea.  This island was Ingmar Bergman's home in the latter part of his life and many of his movies, beginning in 1960 were filmed there.  Kris is also a film maker, although less well-known than her much older boyfriend.  (Roth looks like he's about 60; Kris played by Vickie Krieps seems to be about 25.)  A summer Bergman festival is underway, complete with screenings of the master's work, lectures, and a "Bergman Safari" -- that is, a colorfully painted bus that takes visitors around the island to view various places made famous in the director's films.  This is supposed to be a working vacation; Tony is finishing a screenplay and receives many calls from his producers as to casting and financing issues.  Kris is also working, albeit with less success, on her screenplay -- her fountain pens keep running out of ink.  A film festival, featuring a screening of one of Tony's recent movies, is also in full spate.  In the first of several subtle if sardonic points made by Bergman Island's director, Mia Hansen-Love (with a line through the "o"),  Tony's movie, at least as much of it as we see, seems to be a sort of pretentious slasher movie -- a man hunts a woman in desolate, dark landscape and she ends up killing him, apparently with his own knife.  Hansen-Love's point is that the male sensibility motivating Bergman's movies has a misogynistic element and, in contemporary film-making seems to have degenerated into gory horror movies (a comment, perhaps, on the films of Lars von Trier).  From the outset, it's clear that Kris and Tony are badly mismatched.  Tony doesn't pay much attention to his girlfriend and takes phone calls when she is trying to explain her screenplay to him.  They clash as to which Bergman film to screen -- they are staying at one of the director's houses on the island and sleeping in the bed featured in Scenes from a Marriage.  (The BnB hostess sourly notes that Scenes from a Marriage caused "many thousands of divorces.")  There's no sexual or romantic spark between Kris and Tony.  Kris wants to watch one of Bergman's rare comedies, Summer with Monika; Tony insists on screening Cries and Whispers, a film that Pauline Kael decried as unmistakably misogynistic and, even, hysterically gynophobic -- a flaw in Bergman Island is that both Tony and Kris seem surprised at the extremely dire subject matter in Bergman's movie; Kris calls it a horror movie without the comfort of seeing monsters vanquished that the genre usually supplies.  Kris is clearly dissatisfied with the relationship and she engages in a flirtation with a young man her age.  While she is supposed to be participating in the Bergman Safari bus-tour, she makes her own inspection of the island with the young man and they end up swimming together at a beach where the water is full of jellyfish.  (They playfully pitch jellyfish at each other.)  The Bergman Safari is satirically treated.  A key stop involves a place where a house was once used as a set for a Bergman film (I think it's Persona) but has long vanished:  everyone obediently looks at a field-stone wall in which a section had to be replaced and some trees where the house once stood.  The people  on the bus are Bergman fan-boys of the most literal-minded type -- they quarrel about whether the title to Bergman's Shame (also shot on the island) is called just Shame or The Shame.  Meanwhile, Kris' friend has  taken her to see Bergman's grave.  Back at the house where Scenes from a Marriage was filmed, Tony shows his indifference to Kris by not even getting mad at her for standing him up on the Safari.  They go out for a walk.  Kris has paged through Tony's notebook full of writing and pornographic sketches, some of them featuring bondage and, obviously, a little disturbing to her.  They have earlier quarreled about Bergman -- the director had nine children with six women and paid no attention to any of his progeny.  An elderly woman defends Bergman saying that he was running the National Theater at the time and had made 25 films in as many years.  Kris says:  "So you are saying he had no time to change diapers."  This is, indeed, what the woman has implied.  Kris says that she would like to have nine children with six different men, a statement that upsets Tony.  On their walk, Kris tells Tony about her screenplay and, as she speaks, the movie opens into a film within a film.  We now see scenes, indeed, whole sequences from the movie that Kris has written.

The film within the film is very obviously intended as the antithesis to Bergman's great, despairing film-declarations.  A young woman named Amy (Mia Wasikowski) attends a friend's wedding on Faro Island.  She runs into a former boyfriend named Joseph.  Twice before they have been romantically involved:  once it was "too early" for her; then, the second time "too late".  Both of them are involved in other relationships but their "significant others" (as they say) are not attending the wedding.  In a sharp contrast to the weighty affairs litigated in Bergman's films, the main issue troubling Amy is the fact that she has brought a stylish white dress to the wedding and protocol forbids anyone from wearing white at such an affair but the bride -- this leads to much discussion among the characters and soul-searching for Amy.  After much hesitation, Amy and Joseph resurrect their failed romance and end up in bed together.  But Joseph feels bad about betraying his girlfriend and rejects Amy's attempt to re-ignite their romance.  He leaves and Amy is desolate without him.  This is where Kris' account of her projected film ends.  She says that she's "stuck" and doesn't know how to end the movie:  should poor Amy commit suicide? What should she do?  At this point, Tony gets an urgent call from his producers (he has already interrupted Kris' story several times) and, now, has to leave the island himself for a meeting somewhere.  Kris stays behind since they have rented the BnB, Bergman's cottage adjacent to his screening compound, for another few days.  It seems obvious to the viewer that Kris and Tony's relationship is doomed.

But there's an epilogue that is intentionally confusing.  Kris goes to Bergman's house, a fairly luxurious place a few miles away.  The house isn't ordinarily open to the public but Kris finds the door open.  She goes inside and meets the young man with whom she exchanged volleys of jelly-fish.  (He had to leave the island to attend at this grandfather's deathbed -- the old man has now died and the grandson is listening to music from Bergman's collection of LPs and brooding about his loss.)  The young man leaves (without the embrace with Kris that we expect) and Kris, alone in the house, looks at Bergman's things, including a model of the Swedish National Theater in which we see a tiny figure of Bergman in an upper gallery seeming to eavesdrop on a rehearsal.  Then, Joseph from Kris' screenplay (and imagined film) appears.  He says he is about to take the ferry off the island.  And he says that the shooting is now finished.  We see that one of the rooms in Bergman's house is still fitted-out with movie lamps, reflectors, and tripods.  The film, then, cuts to the ferry but it is approaching the island, not leaving.  Tony is on the ferry with a little girl probably about six.  With the girl, Tony drives the car to the Bergman cottage where Scenes from a Marriage was filmed.  Kris is working in a windmill on the property.  She sees the little girl and comes from the windmill to ecstatically greet the child; obviously, the child is her daughter with Tony and they, now, seem to be a happy couple.  The ending is complicated and hard to parse.  However, my view is that Kris actually made the film about Amy and Joseph and the wedding on Faro Island; Joseph, the actor in that film, bids Kris farewell after the final shot in the picture has been completed.  (This means that the extended sequences showing Amy and Joseph aren't merely imaginary -- they are, in fact, clips from a movie that Kris actually directed and, indeed, completed on the island.)  The surprise ending is that Kris and Tony, although not well-suited to one another, at least, apparently, are still together, seemingly happy, and have a child.  This provisionally happy ending, of course, is in direct contrast to Bergman's typically tragic denouement.  

As I have noted, the scenes involving the wedding and Amy and Joseph's revived affair are intentionally sunny, trite, and feature (as with Lena Dunham's TV work) lots of casual drug use, nudity, and sex.  Kris' esthetic is posited as female -- the opposite of Tony's sadism and Bergman's exhausting and fearsome misogyny.  Early in the film, Kris notes that the island is bright and idyllic (and, indeed, it looks like Door County, Wisconsin or Cape Cod) and she wonders why Bergman shot the place in dismal black and white like a location in a horror film.  Ultimately, Kris is committed to making a gossipy kind of smart and witty comedy; Tony makes films with men and women literally slicing one another up.  The viewer is left to consider whose esthetic is more valuable.