Real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy over­lap in the first trail­er for Bergman Island

This past Thurs­day saw the announce­ment of the offi­cial selec­tion at 2021’s Cannes Film Fes­ti­val and kicked off the cus­tom­ary inter­im peri­od pri­or to open­ing night, dur­ing which the big-tick­et films try to drum up buzz by unveil­ing their first trail­ers. Not 24 hours after the long-ges­tat­ing Bergman Island was con­firmed for a Com­pe­ti­tion slot, the patient pub­lic got their first real look at the expres­sion­is­tic dra­ma with an inim­itable set­ting for its backdrop.

Mia Hansen-Løve makes her return to the Croisette for the first time since her 2009 break­out Father of My Chil­dren with an ambi­tious por­trait of dis­sat­is­fac­tion and escapism, filled out with some world-class stars. The film takes us to the Swedish island of Faro, reput­ed once as the home of Ing­mar Bergman and now a sort of last­ing shrine to the great film­mak­er, for the attempt­ed rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of a strained cou­ple that may instead dri­ve them apart.

A pair of direc­tors, one slight­ly more reput­ed (Tim Roth) than the oth­er (Vicky Krieps), trav­el to the island in hopes of soak­ing up any lin­ger­ing genius in the air so that they might fin­ish their respec­tive screen­plays. But fric­tions between them are exac­er­bat­ed by the atmos­phere on Faro – they stay in the bed said to have launched a thou­sand divorces – and a retreat into fan­ta­sy soon cleaves the film in two.

The script Krieps is work­ing on soon takes over the nar­ra­tive, revolv­ing around anoth­er young woman (Mia Wasikows­ka) sort­ing through her dynam­ic with her man (Anders Danielsen Lie), and invit­ing the audi­ence to won­der about the mem­brane between her life and her work. In turn, that line of ques­tion­ing can also be applied to Hansen-Løve her­self, a for­mer half of a two-cineaste rela­tion­ship with Olivi­er Assayas.

Fans of the Dou­ble Life of Veronique (a favorite of Wasikowska’s) and Bergman’s assort­ed takes on frac­tured iden­ti­ties as wish ful­fill­ment will find plen­ty to pore over in this dense and beguil­ing film, sure to be one of the mar­quee debuts at Cannes this year. If noth­ing else, it announces Hansen-Løve as a major tal­ent on the world stage, a long-await­ed affir­ma­tion after her last film Maya couldn’t even get dis­tri­b­u­tion in the US.