Here is an elegant and ruminative dual narrative from Mia Hansen-Løve, a parallel romance concerning monogamy and its discontents. It’s set on the Swedish island of Fårö, home to Ingmar Bergman and the location of many of his films, his house and properties there being preserved as a festival and study centre site. It’s intriguingly autobiographical and the Bergman-adjacent discussion and ambience creates something instantly serious, although the effect is also sometimes self-conscious and desiccated. Perhaps in order to pre-empt charges of swoony Bergman-worship, the film has one character boorishly attack Bergman’s reputation but the effect is unsatisfying in another way.
Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps play Tony and Chris, a renowned film director and his screenwriter spouse who have come here for a creative retreat. Chris wants to tell Tony about the script she’s having trouble with: he is unhelpful and distracted, but nonetheless we see Chris’s movie idea dramatised on screen. The film-within-the-film stars Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie as Amy and Joseph, a couple who were lovers as teens but broke up, and now find the spark re-igniting, in a difficult and upsetting way, when they meet later in life as guests at the wedding of a mutual friend.
Amy’s tristesse amplifies and makes explicit Chris’s own anxieties about her relationship and this juxtaposition of the real and imagined versions of marital woe is effective: although it is arguably a little predictable when fact and fiction duly leak into each other. The movie ends with a flourish of the sort Almódovar could have created, although this has less primary-colour exuberance. A valuable if slightly passionless and reticent movie.
• Bergman Island is released on 3 June in cinemas and on 22 July on Mubi.
