VIFF 2021: Bergman Island
VIFFThere is a tender and thoughtful parade inside Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island that serves one element and one element only: the master of the craft and namesake Ingmar Bergman. Nothing will be more evidently clear in the cinematic form than the passion, love, and lore that inspires this meta piece on the sanctity of cinema and the trials and tribulations of stories that expand from internal disparity and intensity.
To get to it straight off the bat, this is a love letter to a cinematic icon, and while it takes major precedent throughout the story – mainly in its setting and artistic merit – it is the narrative that fills connective tissue with Bergman's existential and meditative flavour of internal exploration. Carried by quite a tender but the seemingly enigmatic relationship between co-leads Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth.
It is this core relationship that, on the surface, is procured with a sense of familiarity and emotive connection. However, as the passage of time commences, the relationship is not necessarily as resolute as the surface would infer. Respectively, the duo carry a certain weight that hides itself in an aloof method of approach, not too dissimilar to that of Bergman's aforementioned work: hands collide but do not hold, phone calls exhausted, and language fails to elicit care. However, the method of externalising such internal emotion is through a meta-approach of a story told within a story.
On a cinematic note, it works wonders to keep the thematic connection to the core of the feature but also craft constant momentum and immersive pacing to a feature that is quite methodically meditative. The use of this narrative arc is quite splendid and ironically sharp in how it manifests feeling and thought via a film through a film – an attribute little can boast.
Mia Hansen-Løve and director of photography Denis Lenoir craft quite an image on screen too to fortify the performance. The colour-grading and palette on offer are subtly boisterous and dominating with dynamic colour and prowess, giving energy to the themes and unsurfaced dormant feelings. Captured equally as well is the scope within Bergman Island that offers a conscious and flourishing oxymoronic yet telling weight of the surface of beauty with its rough edges.
Nevertheless, on the whole, it would seem that this is a delight for fans of cinema and the process, and while elements can be found to be emotionally tender and moving, it is a little too self-centric for mass appeal. Furthermore, while this is not a personal reflection, Bergman Island might feel slightly cold in approach with its manner of meta idiosyncrasies, but ironically enough, it is that very momentum that pushes this feature over the edge for it to be something unique and special.
