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(Glasgow Film Festival • Select event time • Here are a list of days and times at which this event will take place • March Thu 03 • Screening time 20:30 • Fri
04 • Screening time 18:15)
https://glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival/shows/bergman-island-nc-15
"Bergman Island"
A filmmaking couple living in America, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), retreat to the mythical Fårö Island for the Summer. In this wild, breathtaking landscape where Bergman lived and shot his most celebrated pieces, they hope to find inspiration for their upcoming films. As days spent separately pass by, the fascination for the island operates on Chris and souvenirs of her first love resurface. Lines between reality and fiction will then progressively blur and tear our couple even more apart.
The script brings two filmmakers to Fårö and of using landscapes and Bergman’s world as a backdrop, in other words, the two parts, a glimpse into the heroine’s film-in-the-making, a painful first love experience without closure inspiring filmmaker Chris writing, the subsequent episodes that you can’t tell which part of the narrative they belong to, past or future, reality or fantasy. Filmmaking allows to recreate memories that tend to substitute for the reality that inspired them. Chris seems to come to terms with Tony's sometimes unpleasant attitude. You can tell this couple's connectedness and intellectual camaraderie are strong, they've an experience together. Besides, they've a child. But it's not easy for an artist couple to find the right balance between dialogue and sharing that are desirable, on the one hand, and necessary loneliness, on the other. You need to accept to stay outside the mental space that only belongs to your partner. Some intimate things can only be entrusted to fiction, some confessions can only be made through it. Which may cause some pain, how can you figure out what's said, what's left unsaid? This echoes a more universal questionhow well do you know the person you live with? When Chris lays claim to the mill, next to the main house, as her office, it points to her ambivalent relationship with Tony's filmmaker self. It's far enough for her to have a chance to forget about him and take hold of the place, and close enough to be able to sense him and watch him through the window. His own relationship to writing doesn't seem to be as complicated, and he doesn't seem to have to confide his doubts. But you can wonder if Tony's resilience isn't only shallow and if, deep down, his imperviousness isn't a smokescreen for even greater vulnerability.
Regardless, we don't judge either of the two characters, we just bear witness to what they experience, to what happy and unhappy moments come out of it, and to what the heroine must do to come out on top. Coming out on top, that's just what happens throughout the film. You could think the film also portrays the awakening of self-confidence, of a calling you must pursue. It's a way for Chris to own up to the fact that in film, her life can inspire fiction, and that fiction can reflect life, like a ping-pong game, or two parallel mirrors reflecting the same story endlessly. The film is about how something unlocks in Chris, how she embraces fiction, imagines a film, a film in the making that's originally called 'The White Dress' but that could also be named Bergman Island in the end. "Bergman Island" is an emancipation story. It's about emancipation from our masters, but also about a woman's emancipation from a man. It's what the Chris character, who considers herself as vulnerable and dependent, finds out about her own creative force. However, Chris must also free herself from the man she lives with in order to find her freedom. If they must break up, then it should happen once the film is over. As a rule, we need to feel an off-screen space to be able to believe in the character's lives. If the film ends with closure, we don't believe in their existence as much as if a sequel remained to be written. You may think the journey of this couple is bound to end, but what's the film is interested in is to show that there's still some understanding between them. How can they journey on together, in spite of what drives them apart, of a gap widening because of their respective fictions? It all hangs by a thread, but it's still there.
The film is two-fold, it's a film about love for cinema, and Bergman particularly, but also about a double love story. The film moves playfully between different dimensions, past, present, reality within fiction or fiction within reality. The construction comes from the subject matter that comes down to two interconnected questions; that of couples and that of inspiration. When you deal with a filmmakers couple, how much of their dynamic is based on loneliness and how much on camaraderie? Where does fiction come from? Although the film is not about Bergman, the latter's presence is palpable through the film's mood, which raises very interesting issues, including the working of our imagination; it's clear that our perspective on certain landscapes or places may be entirely shaped by how a filmmaker like Bergman has influenced it. Our imagination belong to us and is also shaped by films. That's what the film's about, how a fantasy leaves such a mark on a place that it shapes our perspective on it. As the lady guide explains, Bergman's Fårö Island existed before the actual Fårö. Bergman fell in love with the place because it echoed a landscape that had been on his mind for some time. But his Fårö is a rougher place than the one we discover in the film. Most importantly, he explores faces, and with him, you hardly see the actual places, the horizon or the sky, which have such an intense presence on the island.
Bergman's Fårö is a mental construct that tells about his obsessions and inner demons. So, when you're there, this Fårö is both everywhere and nowhere. Bergman directed some of his most famous films there and spent the last years of his life there. Remotely located in the middle of the Baltic Sea, the island embodies an ideal both terrifying and attractive, austere and exciting, it’s the ultimate place of absolute artistic integrity that we associate Bergman with. After he died in 2007, a book was published for the auction sale of his properties and all that they contained, it was Bergman’s will, considering it was impossible to divide his properties among his nine children. The pictures of his paintings, of the rooms of his houses, of his objects echoing his everyday life didn’t make his work any less fascinating, all these things, whether highly personal or trivial, only added to the aura and the mystery of an island haunted by his work and his presence. Luckily, Bergman’s legacy hasn’t been scattered. Timeless landscapes, stone walls, wildflowers, black sheep, countless birds. To the island's harshness and silence. Actually, the scope format comes as an obvious choice, but the film experiences this option as a liberation. And the film's about this liberation. Fårö was, and still is, a magical place.
Autumn is our most prolific season. We remember 'The Merry Widow', and 'The Magic Flute'. So, the time has come, we think the decision we've made. A home, a hideaway, a fantastic workplace, whose peacefulness and wholesomeness are unparalleled. So, we feel it's important that this place should keep it's unique atmosphere in the coming years. And we believe that the best way to do so is to make 'Hammars' a foundation that, when our time comes, should be passed on to the municipality to be converted into a school or a spiritual retreat for artists. The municipality owns the foundation at no other cost than maintenance and operations. This film is about the power of landscapes. These Swedish landscapes remind us those of Haute-Loire we've seen in 'Goodbye First Love'. The happiness we feel in Fårö brings to mind childhood and teenage memories, although these are very different landscapes, the Baltic Sea on the one hand, Ardèche and the Loire River source on the other. But what they've in common is a wild, pristine quality, a silent atmosphere that invites you to a kind of meditation and that left an impression on our imagination. Nature has been always an inspiration. The pleasure, the emotion you feel when watching nature can easily go hand in hand with a character's journey and inspire fiction in us. That's what happened with 'Bergman Island'. We feel drawn to this physical place, which is also a mental, inner place, naturally. We feel like doors that have been locked so far are opening and that the island makes it possible.
written by Gregory Mann
