Chris (Cripps) doesn’t fly well. With a bandana over her eyes, she rests her head on her husband Tony’s (Tim Roth) lap. As their large passenger plane lands in Sweden. They got in the car and headed for the ferry that would take them to the island of Fario. Where influential director Ingmar Bergman lived and wrote and shot his films.
In our reality, Bergman wants his home and workspace to be open to other artists:
And the truth is Bergman Island, Tony and Chris take advantage of this. A woman visits the house they will be living in, and the bedroom. They will be occupying is the same bedroom Bergman used to film scenes from a Marriage. “The film that brought millions of people to divorce,” he emphasized. He then brings Tony to show him what to do with garbage collection because Swedes take recycling seriously.
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Tony and Chris were given pens with replaceable ink cartridges, laptops, and computers, writing scripts for their projects. The island is very calm, serene and beautiful. You’ll be watching Bergman movies at Bergman’s private 35mm film screenings and riding bicycles.
Background touch: They have a baby girl named June who has returned home with her grandmother. Tony is a well-known director. He attended the screening of one of his films and had a Q&A with fantastic fans.
They have to go on a Bergman safari together – yes. A bus tour of Bergman’s many dark and intimate dramas exists, but Tony ends up going alone. While Chris enjoys an off-road tour thanks to a friendly young student from Hampus (Hampus Nordenson). With whom he shares a not-so-skinny bottle of cider and gravy.
Chris approaches Tony’s desk when he’s not there, flipping through his notebook and glancing at a sketch of a woman in a submissive pose. We later found out that this was a minor breach of confidentiality. As she never shared her work with him, although she says her new script is about “unseen things between couples.”
That’s as much as Bergman on his part.
However, she does share everything she has written with him. In this case, her latest story is about Amy (Mia Wasikowska) reconnecting with her ex-boyfriend Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lee). When mutual friends get married on an island there. Fårö tells us that Chris’ bride is neither a Bergman fan nor a big fan of irony. Bergman Island gets lost in Amy’s story, narrated by Chris, who doesn’t know the ending yet. Is there one?
You’d be stupid not to see Bergman Island in the context of Tony and Chris’ relationship. Werner Herzog calls it “local voodoo” – perhaps the indescribable feeling you get in a situation of being. For lack of a better word, “haunted” by what happened before.
But what if that place is a place of imaginary marital discord? An imaginary marital feud dictated by local legends inspires countless broken relationships? Fictional adultery perhaps inspired by the real-life Bergman? Bergman’s odd facts are part of the dialogue here.
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Married five times and divorced four times, he has nine children by six women; how he made 25 films at the age of 42 and loved his job so much that he didn’t have time to be a father. How one of his children actually didn’t even know he was their father for the first few years of their life.
As I said – layers. And, story after story, Chris’ script adds an extra layer to Bergman Island. Significantly when the two stories overlap, as Amy seems to be a continuation of Chris, or perhaps more specifically, the part of him buried within. When Chris tells Tony’s story, we can interpret the visual representations we see – Vasikovska and Lee playing the characters, reflecting their consciousness.
Tony can’t really see it, but we actually can.
The level of intimacy we have with Chris hints at his more profound discontent with Tony, bringing the earlier scenes – for example, the scene where he barely responds to his s*xual overtures – to a darker tone. Their partnership looks good, with arguments and parenting moments and communication issues. Still, here they are in the enlightened land of Bergman, where the site’s legendary founder and creative cultivator will indeed insist on burning it all down.
Hansen-Love shows excellent control over this complex material. Working in tandem with Cripps’ depiction, it achieves narrative clarity even as the main story and story-within-a-story intersect visually and thematically during a particularly intense third act. But the conclusions he came to were impressive; Bergman’s collision of our reality with Chris’ fictional reality and Amy’s fictional reality is blurry and scattered.
Fear not, Bergman Island isn’t just the film itself, an ode to cinematic art like The Island. And the degrading Monk or The Artist (and far too many of them) – and let’s face it, will only capture explicit references to the Bergman films. Cinema niche. No, it’s too intelligent to be meta.
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He sees the pain of the creative process, especially when it comes to personal experiences like Chris’s, and the impact such art has on relationships and oneself. Remember that an accurate determination is a myth in the movie of life. Bergman Island is a fascinating and thoughtful drama driven by Cripps’ strong writing style and captivating performance.