M, 113 minutes
4 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
Mia Wasikowska in Bergman Island. Image courtesy Umbrella Entertainment
Ask any writer. Who wouldn’t love to spend weeks on end at work at a writer’s retreat, especially a writer’s retreat that had established cred as the former home of a great artist?
In this new film from the award-winning French writer-director Mia Hansen-Love, a creative couple take a working holiday together, far from family and other commitments, on the tiny island of Faro, off Sweden’s Baltic Coast. It was often home to the universally admired cinema director, Ingmar Bergman, who passed away there in 2007.
Clearly, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who both admire Bergman greatly, believe the retreat will work for them. They have crossed the Atlantic, flown from Stockholm, endured a long ferry ride and a bumpy car trip to reach their destination. When they arrive at a secluded house with nearby windmill in the middle of open fields, they are rewarded by clear summer weather.
As they each get to work, Chris is increasingly disturbed by Bergman’s looming invisible presence. It also troubles her that she and Tony occupy the same bed where Bergman’s television series Scenes from a Marriage, the brilliant, cruelly penetrating account of a disintegrating marriage, was filmed with Liv Ullmann in 1972.
Bergman was of course a prolific artist. By the age of 42, he had already made 25 films, among other things. Is Chris, on the other hand, forever repeating herself? Do artists just do the same thing all their lives?
It troubles her to think that the artist may not have been a very nice man. The son of a Lutheran minister, Bergman married five times, and had many mistresses and affairs. Chris wonders about the ethics of a father who wasn’t around for his many children, nine of them from six different women. Her thoughts start to impede the creative flow. Just like the fountain pen that she insists on using, with cartridges that keep needing to be replaced.
While misgivings gnaw away at Chris, Tony is free of self-doubt, reassured in the knowledge that no one’s expecting a Persona from either of them while they’re there.
How artists conduct their personal lives can become a divisive issue. We have only to recall the recent controversies about the behaviour of certain high-profile filmmakers that have impacted their creative reputations.
I have been an admirer of the delicacy and realism of the work of Hansen-Love for a while. Films of hers like Things to Come and Father of My Children have taken a distinctive slant on personal relationships and indeed touched on the lives of creatives before.
As if to puncture the ballooning Bergman industry that attracts cultural tourists to Faro Island, Hansen-Love’s script pokes a bit of gentle fun at the earnest trivia hounds aboard a Bergman bus tour, the tour that Tony finds himself doing alone.
Nevertheless, the connection between Bergman and Faro Island is substantial. The environment spoke to him and he eventually lived there on a permanent basis. Scenes from Through a Glass Darkly were shot there, and it was the principal location for Shame, The Passion of Anna, Persona, the work the filmmaker apparently regarded as his best, and the unforgettable Scenes from a Marriage.
Tony, a successful director who conducts a Q&A on his own work while on the island, has been getting on with his projects. However, when Chris has a glance at a current draft screenplay, she finds it opens disturbing questions about their relationship.
She clearly needs air, and takes up the opportunity of a casual affair with a film student from Stockholm (played by Hampus Nordenson) who shows her around the island, to see the beaches, and local ‘rock art’, huge pillars sculpted by the sea. The veteran cinematographer Denis Lenoir has created many striking visuals of the unusual landscapes.
This brief encounter segues into the development of Chris’ own work, a screenplay in which a troubled young, Amy (Mia Wasikowska gives her character depth and presence), resumes an affair with a former lover, Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), at a wedding they are both invited to.
As the boundaries between the fiction of Chris’s developing screenplay blur with the realities of Chris’s own life, the film develops the intriguing complexity that I have come to admire in the work of Mia Hansen-Love.
First published in the Canberra Times on 11 March 2022. Jane’s reviews are also published on Rotten Tomatoes