A self-regarding take on I’m-not-sure-what: Bergman Island reviewed

Bergman Island sounds, on first acquaintance, like a theme-park attraction. Roll up, roll up! Let us speed you through the shed where Max von Sydow is weeping and then plunge you downwards until you come face to face with a priest struggling with his faith. Then you’ll twist hard left – hold on! – to encounter Liv Ullmann suffering from a series of nightmares in which God appears graceless and indifferent. Or is God dead? To be fair, I’d probably go on such a ride. It may be more exciting than this, and over more quickly. That’s possibly too harsh, but this film is certainly most self-regarding.

Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, it is a meandering, literary, dreamy, inconclusive take on I’m-not-sure-what. It’s not wholly unbeguiling. You won’t wish you were dead like, say, God. But it is densely and tiringly meta. Hansen-Love wrote this while staying on Faro, the Swedish island where Bergman lived and worked and that’s where it is set. The main characters are a married American couple, Tony (Tim Roth, underused) and Chris (Vicky Krieps), who have come for a summer. He’s an established filmmaker, while she’s struggling to write a script (of course she is).

You won’t wish you were dead like, say, God. But it is densely and tiringly meta

They are staying in one of Bergman’s houses (he owned four), which, as a local tells them cheerily, includes the bedroom ‘where he shot Scenes from a Marriage, the film that made millions of people divorce’. That’s not encouraging. We are, I think, meant to sympathise with her, especially as he’s rather in love with himself, but she tested my patience. The house comes with a stunning whitewashed old mill where she chooses to work, but it’s ‘too beautiful’ and ‘too perfect’ and it’s making her feel ‘oppressed’.