Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Maybe Bergman Island is above my intellectual pay grade. I always say a film should work on its own merits, but some films are built to be fully understood only in real-world contexts, and I fear that is very much the case with this one. Would this be far easier to understand and appreciate with a working knowledge of Swedish film director and writer Ingmar Bergman? Having nearly zero such knowledge myself, I find myself presuming the answer is yes, although I have no way of knowing for sure. At least, not without doing a ton of research I don’t feel I should have to do. Maybe this movie just wasn’t made for me.

And yet, I say all that, still having found myself interested and compelled by this film, in spite of my having watched the entire thing feeling like I was missing something. That feeling is what prevents me from saying any of you need to fire up Hulu to watch it; the movie, released theatrically October 15, has been streaming since yesterday (January 14).

Part of it may just be that I tend to approach films about writers with interest, being a writer myself. I also have a soft spot for the kind of writing where the lines between reality and fiction get blurred. Typically this means an interest in meta fiction, which used to be a lot more novel than it is these days—we now get movies like The Matrix Revolutions, which hit us over the head with it—but French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve is far more subtle.

In Bergman Island, middle-aged couple Chris and Tony (Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth) are writer-directors themselves, both with a deep love of the works of Ingmar Bergman, going on a writing retreat of sorts—on the Swedish island of Fårö, where Bergman lived and worked. For fully half the film, we see Chris and Tony arrive on the island, get settled there, and have subtle struggles, both with communicating with each other and with their respective relationships to both their current writing projects and with Bergman’s work. Bergman, of course, looms large in this area of the island, largely attracting tourists. In one sequence, Tony goes on a “Bergman Safari,” while Chris winds up with a local young man, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), who gives her a personalized tour of Bergman points of interest on the island.

Hampus, as it happens, is the one character we see both here, and within the rendering of the film (or maybe TV series, she hasn’t decided) Christ relays the story of to Tony. About halfway through Bergman Island, Chris tells Tony she needs some advice about what she’s writing, and she begins to tell him the story. The narrative we see onscreen then switches to the story she is telling, of other characters also coming to this same island, this time a younger couple of people, these ones sort of estranged after years of near misses for a potential relationship. These are Amy and Joseph, played by Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie. They are both headed to the wedding of a mutual friend, and Hampus appears as another guest at the wedding.

When this happened, I wondered if maybe the characters Chris created might somehow show up in her real world in some way—that would be the predictable twist in a more overtly “meta” story. But that’s not the direction Hansen-Løve is interested in, and she leaves a lot more open to interpretation. Bergman Island is a surprisingly pleasant and quiet experience considering all the food for thought it provides, if you think long enough anyway: consider that the second half veers into a “movie within a movie,” and yet the primary characters we’ve watched up to that point are also characters in a movie. They don’t even realize it. And later, there is an abrupt transition from us seeing the rendering of Chris’s story, to Chris and Joseph being in the same scenes together—because we are now seeing the man who plays Joseph, on the set of the film (or series?) Chris eventually shoots in the same location.

How much all of this echoes the work of Ingmar Bergman, I couldn’t say. That’s, perhaps, something for people with a working knowledge and memory of his films to explore. This does leave me feeling limited in my capacity to process all that is onscreen in this film, which feels very intentional, nothing accidental, no matter how subtle. But, as I said, I found myself compelled by it anyway. I just can’t say exactly how or why. I even finished the movie kind of feeling like, I don’t get it. The reason I’ll still give this film credit, though, is because I don’t care about that so much. I enjoyed the journey regardless, even though I never quite gleaned what was its destination.

*Is Chris reading what her husband wrote, or what we are watching?*

Overall: B