Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Bergman Island review – marital woes revealed on a trip to Ingmar Bergman territory

Amplified tristesse … Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth in Bergman Island.
Amplified tristesse … Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth in Bergman Island. Photograph: Ifc Films/Allstar

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 Får​ö, 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.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.