‘Bergmann’s Island’
Address: Mia Hansen-Love
interpreters: Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska
Year: 2021
premiere: Friday, 1 July 2022
★★★★
In this penultimate work from Mia Hansen-Love, cinema becomes a mirror for the writers who shape it and the bonds that form around those efforts. The film peers into how creative partnerships survive, strain, or blur when the collaborators also inhabit a romantic life. The filmmaker appears to offer a personal proximity to a familiar tension, perhaps drawing on the long partnership with Olivier Assayas, a collaborator who has known stretches of blocked momentum when a script finally starts moving again. In Bergmann’s Island, blockage is not born of jealousy or rivalry but arises from the stubborn, shaping force of listening — listening to the moment when the flow falters and inviting it to teach its own patience.
Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth step into roles that evoke Hansen-Love and Assayas without copying them. The emotional core, however, is less about the couple and more about the creative energy that animates a shared project. The setting shifts to the island of Farö, the site associated with Ingmar Bergman, and the film subtly situates its storytelling inside a larger meditation on how a director’s process intersects with inspiration drawn from a real space. Hansen-Love weaves a film-within-a-film through a framework of two critics discussing Bergman’s influence and his multiple collaborations, while a figure weary of Bergman mythology questions whether the reverence might overshadow the human complexity behind the cinema. The result is a layered portrait of authorship that feels intimate, observant, and quietly luminous.
On screen, a structured exchange unfolds: one character studies Bergman’s celebrated trilogy while another challenges the myth that surrounds the director. This dialogue becomes the emotional engine of the narrative, turning the island itself into an active participant in the conversation about film history and personal memory. The interplay between homage and invention is especially palpable, as Hansen-Love crafts scenes that reflect how filmmakers borrow, reinterpret, and contest the legacies that shaped them. The film’s self-referential quality invites viewers to consider how their own favorite moments in cinema were made, and where they might have learned to see the world differently because of them. The result is a thoughtful, sometimes playful meditation on the craft of moviemaking and the human traits that sustain it.
Critics in the film-within-a-film offer their takes with varying degrees of reverence and skepticism, providing a chorus that mirrors real-world conversations about Bergman’s enduring appeal. The dynamic between admiration and critique mirrors the tension found in any long-standing artistic partnership. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the heart of the drama lies not in spectacular plot turns but in the patient, honest exchange of ideas – a reminder that cinema lives in the exchange between creator and collaborator as much as it does on the screen. Bergmann’s Island emerges as a nuanced, affectionate examination of art, memory, and the friction that often accompanies the life of-making films.
Viewed through this lens, the film stands as a quiet triumph of atmosphere and character work. It invites audiences to linger on the moments when a project seems to stall and to appreciate the quiet possibilities that arise when dialogue and reflection take the lead. The island becomes a metaphor for the creative mind: a place of isolation, possibility, and unexpected connectivity, where every conversation can spark a new direction and every pause might be the seed of a breakthrough. For fans of Hansen-Love’s sensibility, Bergmann’s Island offers a delicate, richly observed extension of her cinematic language — one that respects Bergman’s legacy while insisting on the vitality of contemporary collaboration in the arts. [Citation: Critical essays on Bergman’s influence and Hansen-Love’s filmmaking approach]