For an artist, whether you create on the shoulders of giants or in their shadow is all a matter of perspective. In Bergman Island, married filmmakers Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) travel to Fårö, the Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot many of his films. And where the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur.
With such a rich artistic tradition at your back, the legacy of all those who came before can be as overwhelming as it is empowering, with all work being obliged to be in dialogue with those who came before. Every creative must grapple with this idea, but not all grab it by the horns as confidently as Mia Hansen-Løve. The film, told in two distinct parts, first follows Chris and Tony’s loving, but complex marriage and the ways they each pursue their craft, before making way for a visualization of Chris’ ideas for her next film that leads into a gentle merging of the two.
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Almost immediately, Hansen-Løve draws her two artists on opposite ends of a creative spectrum. For Chris, creativity is all intuition, a more naturalistic, passive process that relies on finding her narrative rather than creating it. On the isle of Fårö, the presence of Bergman perturbs her slightly, prompting her to question the legacy that Tony seems to wholeheartedly embrace. Tony, on the other hand, is one of the most infuriating types of artist – the one who can sit down and simply do the work, without all that much complaint. Both art and acclaim seem to come to him naturally. Tony is the far more practical of the pair, and seems both more enamored with Bergman’s legacy and less impacted by its weight.
While Hansen-Løve never settles for anything so pedestrian as an outright battle-of-the-sexes, Tony and Chris’ interaction with Bergman’s legacy emerges in implicitly gendered ways. For example, Chris’ mixed sense of curiosity and frustration at the privilege of a man who could devote his life to his artistic practice while a series of women raised his children clashes with Tony’s defensiveness, as he wonders aloud if he ought to be angry about a long dead man’s behavior on her behalf.
Constantly in Bergman Island, Bergman is filtered through the lens of Chris’ feminist ideals, but in turn her beliefs are refined and challenged through her encounters with him. Art is no one-way road – the artist is just as impacted by the audience as the audience are by the artist, especially when both parties are creators in their own right.
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When Chris tells her story, it is to another creator, whose attention and line of questioning (or lack thereof) help shape her narrative – both Chris’ film and, on a metatextual level, Bergman Island itself are reflexive, influenced by the other artistic presences on the island. Both are playful with Bergman and his artistic legacy, responding to his tendency to write female-centric stories from a male perspective by exploring similar themes from a feminine perspective in a way that honors Bergman’s legacy and their own contributions to film. Bergman Island is not about anything so simply as rebuking Bergman or idolizing him, but about working in dialogue with the artists who precede and inspire us.
While Bergman Island has been praised as a complex work of metatextuality, Hansen-Løve doesn’t limit herself only to Bergman – she traverses music with just as much attention to detail as she does film. Hansen-Løve draws our attention to her diegetic soundtrack three times as Chris weaves her narrative for Tony. Amy asks Joseph if he chose Tina Charles’ “I Love To Love” when it plays at a party. A minor character performs Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s “Summer Wine”. And, in a scene that veers from uplifting to poignant to gut-wrenching, Amy dances with friends to ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All”.
The three songs overlap in unexpected ways – all tell tales of thwarted romance, all detail a specific emotional distance between lovers – but what is most interesting is how they echo Bergman as songs written by men, but performed by women. These are perhaps the most subtle of Hansen-Løve’s allusions to Bergman’s fascination with the female experience (see Persona, for example), but in a film this tightly constructed, and in the hands of such a skilled director as Hansen-Løve, it would almost be naïve to assume that her selections are coincidental.
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All three songs are given pride of place, deliberately pointed out to the audience, But the most prominent is easily the song by another of Sweden’s most famous cultural exports besides Bergman – ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All”. A song written by a man about his ex-wife, who then performs the song, thus making the lyrics seem as though they are addressed to the original writer, “The Winner Takes It All” has an odd layer of metatextuality in pace with the themes of Bergman Island. The song’s uniquely inverse production and performance construct a work that is a dialogue, rather than a duet – its deft handling of tragedy, inevitability, and forgiveness comes from the creative process that animates it, from the mutual trust between creator and performer, between artist and muse, between lovers.
In Bergman Island, when Mia Wasikowska as Amy dances to this song, it’s a triumphant scene immediately punctured – just when Amy seems to have finally lost herself in a joyful moment, and is content to not revolve around her love for Joseph, she relapses, reeled back in by the promise of love. When the song abruptly ends, as Amy has abandoned her momentary happiness for a man who stands her up, left alone in the quiet darkness, it’s nothing short of tragic. For myself, it was in the poignancy of this moment that Bergman Island truly took shape, moving beyond intellectual playfulness into something that captures the euphoria and quiet devastation of the creative process.
Works of art, be they Bergman films or ABBA songs, find us in the height of our emotions, and we respond – for Chris, this is through writing and filmmaking; for Amy, it is through these as well as dance and spontaneity. Our own creative work and expression is shaped by art, and in turn, as the song flits between offering comfort, joy, and ultimately emphasizing Amy’s loneliness, Hansen-Løve shows us how our emotions can reinvigorate and repurpose another’s work. Hansen-Løve draws equally on high and low culture, on Swedish auteurs and Swedish pop music, weaving different influences into a film that is in a process of constant dialogue, shaping and reshaping, not as a mere intellectual exercise, but as something of vital artistic and emotional importance.
