There’s a famous line in the old romantic comedy As Good As It Gets, where Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt that she made him want to be a better man. It’s sold as a great compliment.
Well, Bergman Island sort of made me want to be a better film critic, but I’m not sure if it’s a compliment. It just reminded me how few Ingmar Bergman films I’d actually seen.
Photo: Screenshot
I mean, seen all the way through. Not just a few clips of Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann looking bleakly at each other, or nodding sagely when anyone refers to playing chess with death or whatever.
On the strength of the few films I’ve seen, Bergman’s reputation as the “gloomy Swede” remains intact.
But the fans can’t get enough of Ingmar, like a married couple of film-makers – Tony and Chris, played by Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps.
They arrive at Bergman’s home - the place that inspired so many of the late director’s best works – hoping for inspiration in their own films.
The idea of a couple, each attempting to write a Bergmanesque film, under the daunting influence of the man himself…that’s a potentially dark, destructive story worthy of Bergman, you’d think.
As Tony and Chris take walks around Bergman’s island, they meet people who knew him, or knew people who’d known him.
He was a man for whom the work was everything. Certainly, more important than his many children, mostly born to different mothers.
This aspect of Bergman is most disturbing to Chris. Is it possible to create great art, while being a callous, self-centred person, she wonders?
Chris struggles to get her thoughts on paper. Tony on the other hand seems to find the act of creation relatively easy.
And, like a good Bergman couple, they argue over this, they take off on lone hikes without telling the other, they meet intriguing strangers and contemplate infidelity.
Maybe I should have studied a few more Bergman films, but on the strength of Bergman Island – directed by French-born Mia Hansen-Love - I’m not sure I could have faced it.
When the breezy Swedish concierge shows Tony and Chris around the cottage, she points at the family bed that inspired Scenes of a Marriage. That film in turn inspired millions of divorces, she grins. Oh those Swedes!
Midway through their stay, Tony and Chris are encouraged to tell the stories they’re writing. Tony demurs. He doesn’t want to jinx it, he says.
Chris on the other hand launches into a full account – the story of an affair resumed after many years.
In the middle of their story there’s a brief moment where the action pauses for an excerpt of ‘Summer Wine’ an old number by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.
I found myself wishing that instead of Bergman Island, they could have gone to “Lee and Nancy Island”, where at least I might have picked up a few more of the references.
If you react to Bergman films the way I react to florid Sixties ballads, Bergman Island may very well be for you.
You’ll like the fact that it refuses to resolve itself, instead ending in a sort of meta-cinematic coup that presumably echoes the work of the Master. Didn’t Bergman say once “My basic view of things is not to have any basic views of things”?
