There’s a lovely wind that blows across the island of Fårö, Ingmar Bergman‘s actual home for several years, and his spiritual home for several decades. Even in the summer, when Mia Hansen-Løve‘s “Bergman Island” is set, the breeze is constant, cool and a little salt-dampened, tousling Vicky Krieps’ hair, scudding through the tufts of scraggly dune-grass and sweeping majestically across the vast empty spaces where the point of this movie is supposed to be. With the best will in the world, which is the only will anyone who’s such a fan of “Eden” and “Things To Come” could possibly bring to a new Mia Hansen-Løve project, absolutely nothing of any consequence happens in the director’s first Cannes Competition title. And then it happens twice.
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After that, nothing happens roughly one half-time more, depending on how invested you are in working out which of Hansen-Løve’s indulgent avatars is fictional and which is a projection into the future, a flashforward, or perhaps the product of a localized Nordic wormhole that tinkers uninterestingly with the timeline and turns vibrant cinematic voices pallid with self-absorption. The story of Chris (Krieps), a filmmaker in a romantic rut while staying on Fårö, working on a film about Amy (Mia Wasikowska), a filmmaker in a romantic rut while staying on Fårö, made by Mia Hansen-Løve in the wake of her divorce while staying on Fårö this is an auto-auto-auto-fiction that throws out the occasional fun, cinephiliac in-joke, and teases the odd insight into creative blockage and romantic unfulfillment. But mostly, it serves to prove the old adage that a self-deprecating awareness that your movie has nothing going on in it is no substitute for having something going on in your movie. Several excellent critics have been effusive in their adoration and enraptured by its perceived depths; I really wish I could be one of them (as one of the oddly basic earworm tracks featured goes, I also Løve to Løve), but frankly, I’m too busy wondering if all of them were victims of a press screening gas leak, or if I was.
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, the windmills of Chris’ mind turn over inside the actual windmill in which she’s chosen to work. Pointedly, the mill is set a little way away from the main house in which she and her slightly more famous director partner Tony (Tim Roth) are staying. That house, and indeed their bed, is the one in which Bergman shot “Scenes from a Marriage” (a movie described as having “made millions of people divorce”) and is now given over to artists’ residencies. They have left their daughter, a moppet laboring under the old-lady name of June, at home and come to work on their separate projects, and while on cordial enough terms (Roth and Krieps do give out the vibe of longtime partners no longer in the first, or even fifth stage of passion) the rift between them grows deeper as the days wear on.
The first hour or so of “Bergman Island” proceeds enjoyably enough, as, in cinematographer Denis Lenoir‘s airy, breezy imagery, Chris and Tony get acquainted with the island’s wild natural beauty and with the life story of its most famous resident, of whom both are fans. And every now and then the Hansen-Løve who has such a precise eye for the skewering detail rides again, particularly in Krieps, who gets to fill some of the gaps in the idling pace with offbeat performance moments – an inexplicable fit of giggles before bedtime; a change in mood that passes over her face like weather; a quasi-seduction that she second-guesses in favor of leaving the room holding a duck ornament, quacking softly.
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And the English-as-a-second-language problem that so dogged the writing of Hansen-Løve’s disappointing last film “Maya” is less pronounced here, mainly because so many of the supporting characters are the island’s residents or other international visitors who have come to partake in the booming tourist trade. Indeed the idea of Fårö as a kind of Bergman Disneyland, complete with reverently preserved locations, gift shops where you can buy replicas of his leading ladies’ sunglasses and a “Bergman Safari” bus tour, comes in for some gentle ribbing. As do the assorted visiting Bergman dorks who attempt to outmatch each other in magnificently boring trivia, like whether the English title of “Skammen” ought to be “Shame” or “The Shame.”
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But just when it seems the film will amount to an amiable amble around the island and a bittersweet end-of-relationship tale far gentler than anything the Swedish maestro would have conceived, the already navel-gazey movie turns more inward still. Chris tells Tony her idea for her new screenplay, which, sigh, we see play out as a film-within-the-film nudged along by Chris’ narration. Amy (Wasikowska) is a filmmaker who has come to Faro for a wedding but also to see Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), an ex with whom she supposedly shares some electric bond despite there being not a shred of erotic chemistry between them, even when the two are naked and on top of each other. ‘Bergman Island’ is markedly sexless – it’s no wonder Tony has resorted to drawing lewd little bondage-themed doodles in the marginalia of his latest script. Which is another avenue, along with a quasi flirtation between Chris and a long-faced student filmmaker who looks almost comically like Stephen Merchant, that briefly intrigues but goes nowhere.
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This fiction then bleeds into reality in not terribly illuminating, time-squirrelly ways. It’s a do-over within a do-over that is a little reminiscent of Hong Sang-soo, while the conversational tone is slightly Rohmer, and there is something of latter-day Olivier Assayas, Hansen-Løve’s ex, in the loose, find-it-as-you-go approach. But if it’s admirable that despite that list of sorta-influences, the director has absolutely resisted the attempt to mimic Bergman himself in any way – even the quaint harp-and-flute score could not be less Bergmanesque – it is disappointing that in making a film apparently about herself three times over, there are so few hallmarks of what made her own best work so great. In both “Eden” and “Things to Come,” Hansen-Løve drew characters so vivid they became portraits of entire generations or life stages. In “Bergman Island,” she looks inward, finds a story that few who are not filmmakers noodling their way through mild creative crises have much reason to care about, and, via fictionalized alter ego Chris, wonders aloud if what she has there is “enough for a film.” I’m very sorry to say, it isn’t. [C]
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