Bergman Island begins with our characters Chris (Vicky Krieps) and her husband Tony (Tim Roth) arriving in Fålo, Sweden. The couple’s plan is to go to Ingmar Bergman’s old home, where he wrote most of his films, in order to draw some inspiration for their next scripts. They plug in their coordinates on a GPS. “You will reach your destination in one hour and 48 minutes,” it says, which is, unironically, the length of the film. Bergman Island, however, never reaches its destination. Ten minutes into the film, there’s no conflict, no story to chisel out from this stoic film. It’s another film about writers “going somewhere to write,” as if they just “want to be” in the foreign world they’re thrusted into.
20 minutes into the film, still no story or conflict. The film is almost comedic at times. It doesn’t quite know who its protagonist is (we assume it’s Chris, but still in the first act, there’s no way to discern that as we see her enjoying herself with one of the museum’s employees.) I guess it’s supposed to act, operate, and pay homage to a Bergman film?
35 minutes in: still no conflict ensues, but it turns into somewhat of a film geek’s fantasy. The characters are so self-indulgent in that they “need to go somewhere” to write, that there is no externalized conflict, ending up a waste of the actors’ talents.
45 minutes in: look! Finally some rejection and conflict like this movie could go somewhere! Oh… but it’s just Chris suffering from writer’s block (ok, still something.) But it then shifts into an unnecessary frame narrative that totally detours from the character’s bare kernel of a story. Fiction then blurs into reality and reality blurs into fiction a la Day for Night, as characters from different timelines appear in others, not in an effective way, however.
Mia Hansen-Løve once said, “All of my films are my version of Heat.” I just wish some of that love and passion went into this film. There’s a line of dialogue that goes “if you look at something long enough it becomes interesting.” This film, however, never does. One hour and 48 minutes later, we never reach a destination, having veered wildly off course. “There’s a world outside your own asshole,” Chris says in the film. Yes, indeed there is.