Ingmar Bergman’s love affair with Fårö, a minuscule island in the Baltic Sea, began in 1960 — a blind date that leapt into unexpected love at first sight. Bergman was looking for a shooting location for his upcoming movie, Through a Glass Darkly (1961); his production team thought this island Bergman had never visited might work for the film’s emotionally heavy story; vóila. So immediately enchanted with the by-turns pastoral and austere Fårö was Bergman that he would shoot five more movies there — and live out the rest of his life on its limestone-covered shores.
Chris and Tony (Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth), filmmakers in love, hope a summer trek to the isle will be as inspiring to them as it was for this Swedish director they mutually treasure. At the beginning of Mia Hansen-Løve’s charming new movie, Bergman Island, the pair travels there for a couple of reasons. Tony, internationally notable enough for fans to regularly declare him their favorite filmmaker at meet-and-greets, is doing a live Q&A after a screening at one of the island’s theaters. Both members of this coupling are working on new screenplays, too. Still in those early stages fraught with furrowed brows and blank Word documents, the two would benefit from gulping in some of this apparently creatively stimulating seaside air. Hopefully the fact that Chris and Tony are sleeping in the same bed in which Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson often bickered in Scenes from a Marriage (1973) — Bergman’s marital drama that legend says provoked millions of divorces in Sweden — doesn’t end up similarly influential.
It’s suggested that something isn’t quite right between Chris and Tony. They’re comfortable around each other; their body language suggests a long-term bond before we even learn that they have a young daughter. (She’s staying with the grandparents.) Yet a familiar unease — like a subtle dissatisfaction with the way things have been for so long — lurks. The movie never quite erupts, though. When Tony describes his coming-together screenplay to Chris as being about “unspoken meanings that circulate through the daily life of a couple,” he’s basically also talking about the first stretch of Bergman Island, whose understated tensions come from Chris’ creative anxieties chafing against Tony’s relative ease with his own, and the former feeling less accomplished than her older and more established life partner. Bergman’s influence on the actual movie is kept relatively in the background — it’s like a nerdy accessory — though the fact that his prolific and thoughtful filmmaking came at the cost of his loved ones is another thing bothering Chris. Is it possible to be as great and productive as Bergman was artistically and be comparably great in life too?
Some movie-minded viewers may naturally think of Chris as a stand-in for Hansen-Løve and Tony as one for Olivier Assayas. (The former was with Assayas for 15 years, starting when she was about 21, and had a child with him). Though the movie — mostly breezy and always pleasant in a melancholic late-summer kind of way — is hardly a juicy, thinly disguised tell-all. Although I would have appreciated some of that format’s detail-obsession as it concerns Chris and Tony’s art: much of their often-opaquely looked-at inner lives could have been better illuminated if it dwelled at all on what their movies are about and what themes they most often revisit.
Bergman Island, though agreeable for all of its Chris and Tony-centered first half, begins to feel fuller about an hour in, when Chris, finally with a pretty good idea of what her movie is going to be, takes Tony for a walk and relays to him, in detail, its storyline. Rather than just have Chris recite the whole thing, with us essentially being the walk’s third wheel, Hansen-Løve dramatizes it. Chris’ imagined movie stars Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie as an on-and-off-since-childhood couple that reunites and briefly rekindles their relationship at a mutual friend’s wedding. Its bittersweetness, pestered by the fact that both people are in committed relationships outside of this reunion, is almost effortless. You know this story within a story is having an effect on you when the movie briefly returns to Chris and Tony and you want it to go back to the Wasikowska and Lie stuff. That effect solidifies even more when the reaction to a well-timed deployment of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” elicits not a groan but something close to the sadness one feels when a chapter of their lives has seemingly finished.
Our knowledge that the Wasikowska character is also a director, paired with her story’s meta plot twist, may sound like it would, from a distance, make Bergman Island overly tricky — a sort of cinematic Russian doll — in a way meant to obviously remind us of Bergman’s equal parts rattling and structurally strange Persona (1966). (Mid-movie, Chris buys the iconic sunglasses Bibi Andersson wore in that film.) But you never feel this immersive, naturalistic movie working over you, trying to itself be a kind of trinket. The outwardly lower-key Bergman Island is often the movie equivalent of a really good vacation. You’re almost more appreciative of what it achieves, how it impacted you, when you look at it in hindsight instead of when everything is still unfolding in front of you.
The island itself feels like a representative of Chris’ mind, just as much wrapped up in her day-to-day worries and formative experiences as the creativity that is alternately impeded or fueled by both. I enjoyed exploring this brain, even if perceptive observations are more common here than dramatically satisfying resolutions.
After watching Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) with Tony at one point during Bergman Island, Chris remarks that, to her eye, this film is a “horror movie without a catharsis.” Does she know the same thing could be said of the movie she’s starring in? True, Bergman Island doesn’t look or feel like a horror movie. And it doesn’t have the out-of-this-world dread or ghostly visuals of Cries and Whispers. But there’s no denying that the horror is still always there. For Chris, writing is a curse that won’t leave her alone, yet she also can’t, and doesn’t want to, imagine life without it. It’s a pain she’ll keep enduring until she can’t take it anymore. A breakthrough is only a temporary salve before the partially destructive urge to make art starts pecking at her again.
LIKE BERGMAN ISLAND, Pablo Larraín’s latest movie, Spencer, also evokes horror, albeit much more directly. This period piece speculates what Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) endured over Christmas weekend 1991, when she apparently decided once and for all that she couldn’t grit her teeth through her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) anymore. The ensuing drama is often throttled by a foreboding jazz-inflected Jonny Greenwood score. It frequently cuts away to nightmarish daydreams. (In one, Diana chows down — and willingly cracks her teeth — on the pearls of a necklace she has purposely dropped into a plate of soup; in another, she frustratedly tears off a hunk of skin with a pair of wire cutters.) And it manages to feel so chilly and claustrophobic, even in the winding Sandringham Estate where the royals fraternize over the holidays, that the superficial beauty of the grounds only register to the eye as grotesque and, somehow, judgmental. (Even inanimate objects seem to be conspiring to make Diana miserable.) The princess spends much of the weekend locking herself in bathrooms, usually to either cry privately or vomit up her last meal — anything that will stave off hanging out with her philandering husband and cruel-eyed in-laws. These bathrooms are the only place where she doesn’t feel watched; in these rare moments she appears to be grasping for some sort of dysfunctional control.
Like Larraín’s last “biopic,” 2016’s eerie Jackie, Spencer isn’t as concerned with fact — a title card announces itself before the action starts as “a fable from true tragedy” — as it is with attempting new emotional excavation of a woman whose image, and the operas of her life, are far more well-known than her psychological fine points. Spencer is also expensive cosplay. It’s a chance for a big-name actress to wear the clothes of and reanimate the affectations of a very-well-known figure. An Oscar nomination is a clinch if enough reviewers concede that this brave actress “disappears into the part.” Natalie Portman’s imitation of Jacqueline Kennedy was great in Jackie; Stewart’s is comparably formidable in Spencer, though her casting feels a little more pointed than Portman’s.
Larraín’s pick for his glamorous princess initially seems a little odd, given Stewart’s deep and very American voice. But the basic similarities jangle in your head as you watch Spencer until there’s a click. (The jangling doesn’t last long.) Stewart’s no stranger to being on the receiving end of a media frenzy; Stewart, like Diana, also has a way of being effortlessly radiant while also conveying a noisy inner rumble through body language conspicuously straining to maintain poise. We get a compelling performance — certainly Stewart’s bravest so far (and yeah, the kind which can make you “forget you’re watching Kristen Stewart”) — that, exactly as it was designed to, immediately generates a sympathy that doesn’t waver. The film is at its most emotional in the scenes circling just around Diana and her sons (played wonderfully by Freddie Spry and Jack Nielen); Stewart and these young actors pretty effortlessly build a rapport that feels, of course, familial, but also a little comradely — like they’re the only people they can fully rely on to assure themselves that their persisting discomfort with everything guiding their lives isn’t them just being dramatic, difficult.
Spencer isn’t that narratively gratifying. And it doesn’t give us too much “insight” into its subject, given that it’s all well-realized conjecture. It’s more a series of portraits, meant to encompass what Larraín perceives as something close to Diana’s whole; they are, at minimum, pretty to look at and obviously compassionate. Some of his metaphors can be a little laughably on the nose. There’s that pearl-eating incident (the beauty Diana enjoys is inextricable from what’s destroying her soul!); a burgeoning obsession with Anne Boleyn, who was destroyed by royal pettiness; an ill-timed trip to Diana’s old family house down the way that is now abandoned and falling apart — a yearned-for past to which she can only dream of returning in architectural form. (Another example of Larraín’s looseness with the truth for the sake of striking cinema: the old Spencer family home was transformed into a hotel in 1987; Diana could have safely revisited any time.) But Spencer’s sincere empathy and roundelay of excellent performances (Sally Hawkins and Timothy Spall as two watchful staffers stand out) do wonders to tamper Larraín’s expressionistic indulgences. And despite its sometimes-long spells of heavy-handedness, Spencer did move me.
Peterson Reviews 