sustain:if:able kiwi

Bergman Island: a theological film review

Monthly I write a film review for Touchstone (the New Zealand Methodist magazine). Stretching back to 2005, some 165 plus films later, here is the review for April 2022.

Bergman Island is a delightfully plotted meditation on making. Director Mia Hansen-Løve offers creatively weaves reality and fantasy, probing the nature of imagination on the island of one of Europe’s finest filmmakers.

Creating as an act of fantasy and an embrace of vulnerability are central to island, plot and character. American filmmakers – Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) – ferry to Fårö Island. Each brings their creativity to the craft of film. Tony will bathe in the adoration of fans following a screening of one of his films. Chris will work on The White Dress, which becomes over time a film set on the island of Fårö.

The island is the central character. It offers the actors of Bergman Island and The White Dress places to play, including forests to wander, beaches for night swimming and summer showers through which to cycle. In real life, the island is Fårö Island, where Ingmar Bergman lived and made movies for forty years. After Bergman’s death, family and friends turned his houses into places for writers to work. For readers with writing fantasies, real-life application forms are here.

Films make worlds, and Bergman Island celebrates this making in light-hearted and poignant ways. There is the magical realism of wooden ducks that make noises and beach houses that suddenly appear. Some characters move between films. Hampus (Hampus Nordenson) guides Chris around the island, appears as she imagines The White Dress and returns as film (Bergman Island) and film (The White Dress) search for emotional resolution.

The weight of creative expectation is palpable. Any retreat to write has expectations. The pressures are magnified when one writes in the house of a man who produced forty-nine feature-length films.

These expectations allow a thoughtful probing of the origins of creativity. Searching for a new nib for her fountain pen, Chris flips through Tony’s journal. His hand-drawn pictures, misogynist in nature, suggest that for some creativity comes wrapped in unhealthy shadows. Much modern art is fascinated with the darker dimensions of being human.

When Chris shares The White Dress with Tony, her act of imagination seems diminished by Tony’s disinterest. Much postmodern art is preoccupied with the role of reception as a source of creativity.

Early in the film, Chris questions if faith played a role in Bergman’s creativity. A simple response is to visit his grave at the Fårö church. A more challenging response is to probe the place of retreat in the Christian imagination. Time away, to pray, to meditate, is often lauded as a Christian virtue. But what might the valorising of isolation say about the ordinary and everyday? As Cambridge theologian Janet Soskice writes, “What we want is a monk who finds God while cooking a meal with one child clamouring for a drink, another who needs a bottom wiped, and a baby throwing up over [a] shoulder” (The Kindness of God).

A final scene of Bergman Island affirms the everyday as a source of creativity. As Chris leaves her writing desk to be reunited with her daughter, we witness the domestic energy which inspires her making.

Rev Dr Steve Taylor is author of “First Expressions” (2019) and writes widely in theology and popular culture, including regularly at www.emergentkiwi.org.nz.