Mia Hansen-Løve Lets the Light Into Ingmar Bergman’s Dark Kingdom
Filmmakers make pilgrimages to Fårö as if Ingmar Bergman were a saint. In Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve goes there too, and comes back with a film full of light, and a few hard words for the master.
Since the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman died in 2007, Fårö, the remote Baltic island he made his home, has turned into a place of pilgrimage. His admirers, film lovers and filmmakers come to visit his house and the places where he shot his films, hoping some of the inspiration will rub off. Bergman discovered Fårö in 1960, settled there, wrote much of his later work on the island and shot several of his films on its shores.
In Trespassing Bergman, a documentary shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2013, directors from around the world tour the island, inspect his house, follow his footsteps and touch his desk as if he were a saint. “If cinema was a religion, this would be Mecca, the Vatican,” says the Oscar-winning Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
This week the French director Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island opens in American cinemas. Tony and Chris, a filmmaking couple played by Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps, travel to Fårö looking for inspiration for their next screenplays, and there their reality and their fiction become entangled.
When we spoke over Zoom last week, Hansen-Løve confessed that she too had travelled to the island to draw inspiration from Bergman. Because he is the greatest director of all, the 40-year-old filmmaker said, laughing.
The master of darkness
She is in good company. Many filmmakers and critics regard Bergman, born in 1918 to a strict Lutheran pastor, as the greatest director in the history of cinema, and some see him as its very embodiment. He began writing screenplays in 1941 and directing in the mid-1940s, and went on to direct more than 60 films and documentaries and some 170 stage productions, most of which he wrote himself.
He may be the only director who enjoyed complete freedom in his art, Hansen-Løve said, writing his own work and exploring the subjects that mattered to him and to humanity with a shocking, devastating frankness.
Bergman’s films were usually dark, enigmatic and complex. Psychologists, philosophers and critics have spent decades decoding them and arguing over what they mean. He explored existential questions and human psychology, the absurdity of life and our desperate grip on it, the certainty and terror of death, the struggle between doubt and faith, and the human sense of isolation and alienation. His style served his ideas: dim light, vast pools of shadow, stark contrasts of black and white, later violent reds and blues, and close-ups that squeezed every last emotion out of an actor’s eyes and face.
Bergman Island is a different creature in content, approach and form. It is a feminine film that reflects the softness of its heroine, Chris. Hansen-Løve shoots it in a poetic style, with gentle colours, intimate love scenes and lovely images of the island’s wild landscape, all of which speak of optimism and the beauty of life.
She loves Bergman’s films and has lived with them for a long time, she told me, yet she has no wish to imitate him. Her world is different from his, and she has her own things to say about it. She wanted to make a film about inspiration, and his island was the ideal stage for a couple in search of it. She was also bewitched by the island’s beauty and wanted the film to capture it.
On Fårö, Chris goes through a crisis in her work and her marriage. While her husband, a famous director, buries himself in his script, she cannot find inspiration and suffers from writer’s block. She sinks into frustration and explodes when he suggests she look for another profession. So she sets off on an emotional journey to discover herself and her desires.
Bergman and his women
Bergman, too, explored women’s psychology, their sensitivities and their relationships with men in many of his films, which often revolve around female characters. He explained the interest by saying that he loved women and preferred working with them because they were more expressive in front of the camera. He worked with Sweden’s finest actresses, and his admiration for them did not stop when the camera did. He had love affairs with several of them, married five times and fathered nine children.
In Bergman Island, however, he is described as a selfish man who paid no attention to his children and left their care to their mothers so that he could make his films.
Krieps, the Luxembourg-born actress who plays Chris, told me she doubts she could ever have acted in his films. As a woman of today she could not accept his behaviour, and romantic affairs with actresses are unacceptable in our time. She understood that he was a towering figure whose every order was obeyed without hesitation, but she believes she would have confronted him and stood up to him.
Hansen-Løve denies that she set out to criticise or condemn Bergman. She will not stop watching his films because he neglected his children, she said. She knows that a married woman cannot achieve what a man achieves as a filmmaker, because her responsibility for her children and their upbringing stands in the way.
She made the film, she explained, to explore how one can be a woman and make art. She wanted to know how a woman finds a way to do it and to express herself, aware that she will never reach Bergman’s level and still able to create a fine work of art.
A film within a film
Chris does find inspiration, in herself and in her own life. She tells her husband the plot of her film. A director named Amy comes to the island for a friend’s wedding, runs into her first love, Joseph, and has a brief affair with him although both of them are married. Amy, too, is making a film about her romance with Joseph. Reality and fiction intertwine, and Amy becomes a mirror for Chris, through whom she tries to understand herself, fulfil her desires and live the life she dreams of.
Chris, in turn, could be a mirror for Hansen-Løve. She too was in a relationship with a famous French director, Olivier Assayas, whom she met while acting in his films at the end of the 1990s. She turned to directing in 2007, and Bergman Island is her seventh feature. The couple separated in 2017.
She admits that the film reflects her own experience and the challenges she faces as a writer. Sometimes, she explained, you make a film to show things as they really are, and sometimes you want to fill the gaps, correct them and make them better. You make a film because something is missing from your life, and making it helps you find it. She wants films that draw in light and excitement, sexual and otherwise, all the things that make life beautiful, and she does not want her films to drag her back to death or to life’s terrible moments alone. When she makes a film she looks for light. That is why she makes films, she said, and why she could never make a film of the Bergman kind. Bergman, unlike her, relished staring at life’s cruelty and violence. She wants a film to heal. If she put her hand into the dark side of her own life, she said, she would truly despair.
Bergman Island blends fiction with reality just as it blends homage to Bergman with criticism of him. It has neither his cinematic style nor the philosophical and psychological depths that marked his films, yet critics have praised it since its premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sources: Variety.
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