BEFORE: I got so caught up in the excitement of the New Year that I forgot to check the birthdays of the cast of yesterday's film on IMDB, as I usually do. I found out tonight that Anders Danielsen Lie, who carries over from "The Worst Person in the World", was born on January 1, 1979, so yesterday was his 45th birthday, and he deserves a proper Birthday SHOUT-out.
THE PLOT: A couple retreat to the island that inspired Ingmar Bergman to write screenplays for their upcoming films when the lines between reality and fiction start to blur.
AFTER: I heard a lot about this film, too, about two years ago, but nothing really definitive - it's another festival favorite that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and then had its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. That's a pretty good track record. And of course I did a whole Bergman chain a couple of years ago, and also watched the documentary "Trespassing Bergman", so I know a lot about this Faro Island, where Bergman made a lot of his films and lived for his last few decades. Apparently there's a whole film society that's centered there, and they get a lot of Bergman fans who show up and want to sleep in one of Bergman's old houses and walk where he walked and go on a "safari" through the locations they've seen in his movies. And endlessly talk about his films, or watch one of the scheduled screenings in the projection room, so I guess this is a thing and will continue to be one for some time.
Apparently when you get to Faro Island (and it seems to be pronounced "Four-ah", not "Far-oh" or "Fair-oh") you're greeted by the actress who also played the greeter in "Midsommar", so that would be a big "Nope" for me, I'd suggest turning right around so you don't end up in some kind of bear suit during a folk dance ritual surrounded by feasting cult members. Yeah, I've seen a bunch of Bergman films, so this wouldn't be that far from the realm of possibility. Other people can't wait to sleep in the same bedroom as the couple from "Scenes from a Marriage", which is a film that reportedly caused a million couples to get divorced - so I can't tell if this would be romantic or ironic or really pressing your luck, either way, I'd err on the side of caution and avoid this situation altogether.
Tony and Chris Sanders are a couple that make movies, possibly together and possibly apart, or they write some screenplays together and also work on some separately, I'm not really sure of their process, but apparently it works for them as long as they give each other some space from time to time. I really don't recommend that married couples work together, especially in the filmmaking arena - I've never seen this work successfully for a long period of time, maybe five years before the two people are just so sick of working together and living together that they have to separate to regain their sanity. Like, there's a reason why people used to go to offices to work and deal with one set of people and then commute home and deal with a second set of people, this way their lives weren't just the same thing, all day, every day, and it worked for a good long time. Both filmmaking married couples I've known well could not sustain this, and had to give up either the co-working or the co-habitating or both. Just saying.
(SIDE NOTE: I want to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Noah Baumbach - big fan - and Greta Gerwig, who recently got interviewed after a "Barbie" screening where I was the house manager. If anybody can make this marriage-between-two-filmmakers thing work out, I'm hoping it's you two. Greta was cast in "Bergman Island" as Chris at one point, opposite John Turturro and then Owen Wilson, and all three bowed out due to scheduling conflicts.)
And this makes it a bit difficult to tell the nature of Tony and Chris' relationship in this movie, at first it seems they're either long-time casual friends who vacation together, or people who have been married just a bit too long and can't wait to spread out and work in separate offices and sleep in separate beds for a change of pace. It's the latter, but the two situations seem like they have a lot in common. In fact they've been together for so long that when Chris gets the opportunity to hang out with a young Swedish film student named Hampus, who offers to take her on a private tour of the island, including the beaches and the isolated spots, she ditches the Bergman safari date with her husband, and later talks to Tony about how "cute" the young man she swam in the ocean with was. Wow, that's honest and open and most marriages might not survive that, but these two either have some kind of open marriage, or an agreement that things won't go that far with other partners, or perhaps they're just past any kind of petty jealousy.
(SECOND SIDE NOTE: While watching this film, I was also reminded of another famous couple, at least in nerdy circles, and I'm referring to Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, who did have something akin to an open marriage, or at least an understanding that over time they might fall in and out of love, or at least consider other partners while on tour, and man, they sure seemed to have a few things worked out, didn't they? But then the pandemic hit and they got stuck in New Zealand with their son, and some time during the lockdown they announced their separation, then they reconciled a year later, and then a year after that, they announced their divorce. People learned all the details of their break-up via social media, but still I don't know if it was all due to too much time apart, or perhaps too much time together, or maybe the whole open marriage thing isn't such a great idea either, and even the people who think they have it all figured out maybe don't have it all figured out. I don't know, it's not for me to say. Everybody has to try to do what's best for themselves at any given time.)
Tony and Chris are both big Bergman fans, they love the movies, but Chris has to separate his career from his personal life, since he was married five times and had nine children with six different women, and he never took over any parenting duties when his kids were growing up. Sure, it was a different time and the rules might be different for internationally renowned acclaimed filmmakers, but still. Also Sweden is very liberal and recycles better than any other country on the planet, but perhaps they were slow in getting around to equal rights or helping men get in touch with their nurturing sides, even though they were first on the scene in gender-integration in pop groups, with ABBA being 50% male and 50% female. It's not for me to say.
Anyway, a lot of people go there to visit Ingmar Bergman's grave, where he's buried with his fifth wife, Ingrid (but not the same Ingrid Bergman who was in "Casablanca" and who appeared in "Cries and Whispers" and who was the mother of Isabella Rossellini, this is a different one). And I guess if you hang around Bergman's studio and offices and barns and windmills the legend has it that this will help you write your screenplay or finish that design project you're stuck on or maybe you'll be so inspired to have an affair that your spouse will be OK with, because maybe there's something in the air that brings all this about. I mean, the guy wrote and directed over 60 films, and directed over 170 plays, and didn't retire until he was 85. You can't pick up talent or motivation by osmosis, but you can walk in the path of genius, for whatever that's worth.
While on Faro, Tony screens his film for the Bergman fans, and Chris relates her screenplay ideas to her husband for "The White Dress", and this becomes the film-within-the-film, even though it's not a film yet, just an outline of one. This is a giant red flag, because it's an admission that the story of Tony and Chris is just not interesting enough to sustain a whole film, so they needed to shoehorn another whole story in there. In "The White Dress", a young woman named Amy travels to a friend's destination wedding, also on Faro Island. Another guest at the wedding is Joseph, who she had a relationship with when they were both teens, and then they got back together as adults, only to break up again. They're both in committed relationships, but that doesn't mean they can't fall back into bed together - people can be in love with more than one person at a time, after all, I think that's the take-away here from both stories.
Amy and Joseph have their whirlwind romance together on Faro, but then reality sets back in and Joseph leaves for the mainland without saying goodbye, and Amy is heartbroken once again. Perhaps the genesis of this story is that Chris is imagining, through her characters, what it would be like to cheat on Tony, who is frequently inattentive and critical of her work, it's just his nature. But she knows deep down that while it would feel great to have an affair, if that ended she'd probably feel even worse than before, and she'd have jeopardized her marriage for nothing. You can't have high highs without risking even lower lows, it seems, that's just reality, but then again, on the other hand, isn't it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? Or was Shakespeare also full of crap? At least Bergman walked the walk, he didn't just talk the talk.
The big problem here is that neither story really has an ending or any kind of resolution, instead reality blurs and in the final part, it's impossible to tell reality apart from fiction - Chris wakes up, suggesting that the last section of the film might be her dream, or perhaps that everything that occurred before that was a dream. The actor who played Joseph in the film-within-the-film is now going by his name in real life, and is angry with Chris because during the film shoot he never got to appear in a scene inside Bergman's house. This is weird, because there really was no film shoot, Chris merely described her screenplay to Tony and it wasn't finished yet - unless he's talking about the film shoot that produced "Bergman Island" instead of "The White Dress", but that would mean that this film is even more META than we thought it was. Yep, that seems to be where we're headed, because Chris then has dinner with Anders and with Mia, who played Joseph and Amy, and then Mia leaves to catch the ferry and leave the island, which is opposite of what happened in "The White Dress", when Joseph left on the ferry and Amy stuck around.
It's very confusing, to say the least, and this confirms my hunch that the director didn't quite know how to end either story, either "Bergman Island" or "The White Dress" so she just decided to throw all the board game pieces up in the air and hope they would land in a way that made some sense, only it didn't work and we're all more confused than ever. You can say this maybe is a Bergman reference to a film like "Persona" or "Hour of the Wolf", but I think instead it's a giant cop-out. The final character that gets introduced is Tony and Chris' daughter, June, but the IMDB listing for her makes it seem like she's part of the film-within-the-film, and well, umm, that doesn't make any sense either.
Also Hampus, that cute (?) nerdy film student, is somehow part of both films, and that's hella confusing too. I think finally, at long last, I gained some understanding by reading the trivia section on this film's IMDB listing. DIrector Mia Hansen-Love based the film on her own 15-year relationship with another filmmaker, Olivier Assayas, and she visited the real Faro Island once a year for several years while writing this screenplay, so the Chris character is therefore based on herself and her own writer's block, and during her visits to Faro she met the real Hampus Nordenson, and he was so knowledgable about the island and so connected to how it all functions that she just had to include him in the film. So there you go.
Also starring Vicky Krieps (last seen in "Beckett"), Tim Roth (last seen in "The Misfits"), Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Hampus Nordenson, Anki Larsson (last seen in "Midsommar"), Kerstin Brunnberg, Melinda Kinnaman, Stig Björkman, Magnus Almqvist, Lily Taleb (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Wouter Hendrickx, Joel Spira, Clara Strauch, Matthew Lessner, Gabe Klinger, Grace Delrue with a cameo from Ingmar Bergman Jr.
RATING: 4 out of 10 unhelpful local residents
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