Pick of the Day: “Bergman Island”

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Pick of the Day: “Bergman Island”

“Do you think you can create a great body of work and raise a family at the same time?” asks Vicky Krieps in “Bergman Island.” Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve identified this conversation as “the heart of what the film really is about” in a recent interview with IndieWire. The scene sees a filmmaker couple, Chris (Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), discussing the fact that Ingmar Bergman had nine children and five wives in his lifetime, yet managed to make dozens of films. “How do you think he would have done that if he was also changing diapers?” Chris is asked.

Hansen-Løve’s seventh feature follows Chris and Tony, parents to a young child, on their trip to Fårö, an island in Sweden that famously inspired Bergman. They’re each working on screenplays. Tony is significantly older, more successful, and more respected. It’s impossible not to draw parallels to Hansen-Løve’s relationship with her ex, “Wasp Network” helmer Olivier Assayas, whom she first met as a teenager, and she’s acknowledged that the film is semi-autobiographical.

“Bergman Island” feels intensely personal, and not just in its portrayal of Chris and Tony’s marriage. Though its protagonist is in her 30s, it feels like something of a coming-of-age story, and offers a revealing look into Hansen-Løve’s own creative process. It’s especially fitting that Krieps, best known for her breakout role as a muse in “Phantom Thread,” leads this story of an artist coming into her own.

Hansen-Løve’s English-language debut is ambitious and absorbing, and her decision to include a film within the film, a portrait of doomed young lovers, doesn’t slow down its momentum, but instead adds layers and richness — even when Chris isn’t on the screen, it’s her story that we’re seeing play out.

“Bergman Island” is now in theaters. It will be available on VOD October 22.