Official selection – In competition
Let’s laugh a little with Ingmar Bergman, then, once again serious, let’s pay homage to him. Let’s dance on the grave of a love that has not yet finished moving, let’s write his epitaph. Let’s discover the Northwest Passage between life and fiction. Let’s take a look at what separates women from men when it comes to creating a work of art. Mia Hansen-Love’s Vacation Homework Book offers a busy schedule. However, when it is closed, at the end of the almost two hours of projection of Bergman Island, it is the taste of the holidays that remains in the mouth, not that of homework.
Everything – the complicated interweaving of the themes evoked, the mise en abyme of two levels of fiction, the play with the autobiography (the director, of whom Olivier Assayas was for a long time the companion, wrote a scenario featuring a couple of filmmakers) – should push the company towards seriousness, even stiffness. But the look that Mia Hansen-Love has on her quartet of performers is like the Scandinavian summer light that bathes her film. He refuses the night without denying its existence.
It is with the approach of summer, therefore, that Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) land in Farö. The island of the Baltic Sea where Ingmar Bergman shot a few masterpieces and spent his summers, before dying there, now welcomes artists convinced that the genius of the place will nourish their inspiration. Cinema is to Chris and Tony what English is to Americans and British, a common language that divides them. Especially since it was probably he – the sixty-year-old British filmmaker with an imposing filmography – who taught her the basics of it, a quarter of a century younger and still at the dawn of her career.
Endless twilight
Customers dreamed of for the Farö experience, therefore, both amazed and scared to be assigned as residence the house where the films were shot. Scenes of married life, arguing for hours on whether to take it as a joke or an omen. The first sequences of Bergman Island shamelessly flirt with comedy – which is hardly in the habit of the filmmaker. Mia Hansen-Love films the place with love, but without any reverence. The interminable twilights are occupied by somewhat idle, somewhat deep conversations around the totemic figure of Bergman, his life (bad father, bad companion), his work (filled with the absence of God, desperate – but then where cram Fanny and Alexandre ?).
You have 45.63% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.