Bergman, Ingmar

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares99 Views

    ‘Bergman Island’ Review: Love Among the Cinephiles

    by

    In Mia Hansen-Love’s new film, Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth play filmmakers on the rocks in the Baltic Sea.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” That is Ingmar Bergman, in his memoir “The Magic Lantern,” rhapsodizing on his “secret love,” the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea. Starting in 1960 with “Through a Glass Darkly,” he shot many of his films on Faro and died there in 2007.In “Bergman Island,” Mia Hansen-Love’s slippery and enchanting new movie, Faro, an austere and forbidding presence in much of Bergman’s work, is revealed as a pilgrimage spot for cinephiles and an appealing seaside destination for less obsessive travelers. Visitors can browse in the gift shop and the library, watch movies in Bergman’s personal screening room, or pile into a bus for the guided “Bergman Safari” (an actual annual event). They can also swim, drink, play Ludo and shop for sheepskins.Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) do some of those things, but they’ve come to Faro mostly to work. Filmmakers with screenplays at various stages of completion, they install themselves in the cottage where some of “Scenes From a Marriage” was filmed. The caretaker who shows them around cheerfully describes it as “the movie that caused millions of people to divorce.” (I wonder if the recent HBO remake will have the same impact.)An unmarried couple with a young daughter (she is staying with a grandmother while her parents are in Sweden), Chris and Tony have perhaps unwittingly arrived at a crisis in their relationship. They are affectionate and easy with each other, but the combination of Chris’s restlessness and Tony’s complacency suggests that things are not quite right between them.In Bergman’s films, love is a volatile element, as often as not a catalyst for emotional anguish and psychological disintegration. A man and a woman in a movie with his name on it are unlikely to find much peace. But Hansen-Love, though she is interested in the gloomy Swede and his legacy, is hardly in his thrall, and Chris and Tony don’t live in anything like the state of metaphysical extremity that so often afflicts Bergman characters.Chris is a passionate movie lover who is nonetheless skeptical of the power of the medium, and “Bergman Island” explores her ambivalence in a playful, critical spirit. She is bothered by the fact that Bergman, the father of nine children with six women, pursued his art at the expense of his family obligations. No woman would have been able to get away with that, she says, a complaint that is met with the usual shrugs, jokes and condescension from Tony and their dinner companions.She acknowledges the difference between art and life, but nonetheless wishes for a measure of “coherence” between them. The possibility of such a thing becomes more than just a theoretical question in the second half of “Bergman Island,” when the as-yet-unmade film that Chris is still struggling to write takes over the screen.That movie-within-the-movie, also set on Faro, involves a young woman — also a filmmaker — named Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who travels to the island for the wedding of a friend and encounters Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), the great love of her life. The two of them met as teenagers and all these years later, even though they are committed to other people, find that they just can’t quit each other.Their passionate, guilty romance — and Amy’s blondness — tilt the story closer to Bergman territory than Chris and Tony’s passive-aggressive courtesies, but the more obvious cinematic reference lies closer to home. Chris’s film is in effect a sequel to Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love,” which followed adolescent lovers into young adulthood.The connection between the movie Chris dreams up and the one she’s in seems both elusive and obvious, as do the possible autobiographical implications of “Bergman Island.” Can it be entirely coincidental that Amy is a near-anagram of Mia, the name shared by Wasikowska and Hansen-Love? Is Tony a stand-in for Olivier Assayas, the French filmmaker with whom Hansen-Love has a child? Are we approaching Bergman’s landscape of doubling and collapsing identities from a different angle?But there are also intriguing hints that Chris and Tony’s story may itself be a kind of film-within-the-film, this one conjured out of Tony’s imagination. When Chris asks about his project, he answers that it’s about the unspoken meanings that circulate through the daily life of a couple, a description that fits the first half of “Bergman Island” almost too neatly. He also explains, during a Q.-and-A. session after a screening of one of his movies, that he tends to identify with his female characters. Does this make Chris his alter ego?To her credit, Hansen-Love doesn’t turn “Bergman Island” into a self-conscious philosophical puzzle. It unspools with an easy, fresh-air naturalism against a picturesque backdrop that doesn’t necessarily conform to anyone’s innermost imaginings. The mood, underscored by Robin Williamson’s sprightly music, is mainly comical, and the artists — Tony and Chris, at least — seem more playful than tormented, even at difficult moments.That may be because they both understand the paradox that “Bergman Island” so brilliantly enacts. It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.Bergman IslandRated R. Cries and whispers. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Shooting ‘Scenes From a Marriage’: ‘I Cried Every Day’

      by

      Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac struggled to divorce themselves from their characters in this HBO remake of the Ingmar Bergman series.There were days on the shoot for “Scenes From a Marriage,” a five-episode limited series that premieres Sept. 12 on HBO, when Oscar Isaac resented the crew.The problem wasn’t the crew members themselves, he told me on a video call in March. But the work required of him and his co-star, Jessica Chastain, was so unsparingly intimate — “And difficult!” Chastain added from a neighboring Zoom window — that every time a camera operator or a makeup artist appeared, it felt like an intrusion.On his other projects, Isaac had felt comfortably distant from the characters and their circumstances — interplanetary intrigue, rogue A.I. But “Scenes” surveys monogamy and parenthood, familiar territory. Sometimes Isaac would film a bedtime scene with his onscreen child (Lily Jane) and then go home and tuck his own child into the same model of bed as the one used onset, accessorized with the same bunny lamp, and not know exactly where art ended and life began.“It was just a lot,” he said.Chastain agreed, though she put it more strongly. “I mean, I cried every day for four months,” she said.Isaac, 42, and Chastain, 44, have known each other since their days at the Juilliard School. And they have channeled two decades of friendship, admiration and a shared and obsessional devotion to craft into what Michael Ellenberg, one of the series’s executive producers, called “five hours of naked, raw performance.” (That nudity is metaphorical, mostly.)“For me it definitely felt incredibly personal,” Chastain said on the call in the spring, about a month after filming had ended. “That’s why I don’t know if I have another one like this in me. Yeah, I can’t decide that. I can’t even talk about it without. …” She turned away from the screen. (It was one of several times during the call that I felt as if I were intruding, too.)The original “Scenes From a Marriage,” created by Ingmar Bergman, debuted on Swedish television in 1973. Bergman’s first television series, its six episodes trace the dissolution of a middle-class marriage. Starring Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s ex, it drew on his own past relationships, though not always directly.Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson on the set of the original “Scenes From a Marriage.” Divorce rates in Sweden climbed after it aired.Cinematograph AB/Corbis, via Getty Images“When it comes to Bergman, the relationship between autobiography and fiction is extremely complicated,” said Jan Holmberg, the chief executive of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.A sensation in Sweden, it was seen by most of the adult population. And yes, sure, correlation does not imply causation, but after its debut, Swedish divorce were rumored to have doubled. Holmberg remembers watching a rerun as a 10-year-old.“It was a rude awakening to adult life,” he said.The writer and director Hagai Levi saw it as a teenager, on Israeli public television, during a stint on a kibbutz. “I was shocked,” he said. The series taught him that a television series could be radical, that it could be art. When he created “BeTipul,” the Israeli precursor to “In Treatment,” he used “Scenes” as proof of the concept “that two people can talk for an hour and it can work,” Levi said. (Strangely, “Scenes” also inspired the prime-time soap “Dallas.”)So when Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman’s youngest son, approached Levi about a remake, he was immediately interested.But the project languished, in part because loving a show isn’t reason enough to adapt it. Divorce is common now — in Sweden, and elsewhere — and the relationship politics of the original series, in which the male character deserts his wife and young children for an academic post, haven’t aged particularly well.Then about two years ago, Levi had a revelation. He would swap the gender roles. A woman who leaves her marriage and child in pursuit of freedom (with a very hot Israeli entrepreneur in place of a visiting professorship) might still provoke conversation and interest.So the Marianne and Johan of the original became Mira and Jonathan, with a Boston suburb (re-created in a warehouse just north of New York City), stepping in for the Stockholm of the original. Jonathan remains an academic though Mira, a lawyer in the original, is now a businesswoman who out-earns him.Casting began in early 2020. After Isaac met with Levi, he wrote to Chastain to tell her about the project. She wasn’t available. The producers cast Michelle Williams. But the pandemic reshuffled everyone’s schedules. When production was ready to resume, Williams was no longer free. Chastain was. “That was for me the most amazing miracle,” Levi said.Isaac and Chastain met in the early 2000s at Juilliard. He was in his first year; she, in her third. He first saw her in a scene from a classical tragedy, slapping men in the face as Helen of Troy. He was friendly with her then-boyfriend, and they soon became friends themselves, bonding through the shared trauma of an acting curriculum designed to break its students down and then build them back up again. Isaac remembered her as “a real force of nature and solid, completely solid, with an incredible amount of integrity,” he said.In the next window, Chastain blushed. “He was super talented,” she said. “But talented in a way that wasn’t expected, that’s challenging and pushing against constructs and ideas.” She introduced him to her manager, and they celebrated each other’s early successes and went to each other’s premieres. (A few of those photos are used in “Scenes From a Marriage” as set dressing.)In 2013, Chastain was cast in J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year,” opposite Javier Bardem. When Bardem dropped out, Chastain campaigned for Isaac to have the role. Weeks before shooting, they began to meet, fleshing out the back story of their characters — a husband and wife trying to corner the heating oil market in 1981 New York — the details of the marriage, business, life.It was their first time working together, and each felt a bond that went deeper than a parallel education and approach. “Something connects us that’s stronger than any ideas of character or story or any of that,” Isaac said. “There’s something else that’s more about like, a shared existence.”Chandor noticed how they would support each other on set, and challenge each other, too, giving each other the freedom to take the characters’ relationship to dark and dangerous places. “They have this innate trust with each other,” Chandor said.That trust eliminated the need for actorly tricks or shortcuts, in part because they know each other’s tricks too well. Their motto, Isaac said, was, “Let’s figure this [expletive] out together and see what’s the most honest thing we can do.”Moni Yakim, Juilliard’s celebrated movement instructor, has followed their careers closely and he noted what he called the “magnetism and spiritual connection” that they suggested onscreen in the film.The actors were unprepared for the emotional intensity of filming the series. “I knew I was in trouble the very first week,” Chastain said.Jojo Whilden/HBO“It’s a kind of chemistry,” Yakim said. “They can read each other’s mind and you as an audience, you can sense it.”Telepathy takes work. When they knew that shooting “Scenes From a Marriage” could begin, Chastain bought a copy of “All About Us,” a guided journal for couples, and filled in her sections in character as Mira. Isaac brought it home and showed it to his wife, the filmmaker Elvira Lind.“She was like, ‘You finally found your match,’” Isaac recalled. “’Someone that is as big of a nerd as you are.’”The actors rehearsed, with Levi and on their own, talking their way through each long scene, helping each other through the anguished parts. When production had to halt for two weeks, they rehearsed then, too.Watching these actors work reminded Amy Herzog, a writer and executive producer on the series, of race horses in full gallop. “These are two people who have so much training and skill,” she said. “Because it’s an athletic feat, what they were being asked to do.”But training and skill and the “All About Us” book hadn’t really prepared them for the emotional impact of actually shooting “Scenes From a Marriage.” Both actors normally compartmentalize when they work, putting up psychic partitions between their roles and themselves. But this time, the partitions weren’t up to code.“I knew I was in trouble the very first week,” Chastain said.She couldn’t hide how the scripts affected her, especially from someone who knows her as well as Isaac does. “I just felt so exposed,” she said. “This to me, more than anything I’ve ever worked on, was definitely the most open I’ve ever been.”“It felt so dangerous,” she said.I visited the set in February (after multiple Covid-19 tests and health screenings) during a final day of filming. It was the quietest set I had ever seen: The atmosphere was subdued, reverent almost, a crew and a studio space stripped down to only what two actors would need to do the most passionate and demanding work of their careers.Isaac didn’t know if he would watch the completed series. “It really is the first time ever, where I’ve done something where I’m totally fine never seeing this thing,” he said. “Because I’ve really lived through it. And in some ways I don’t want whatever they decide to put together to change my experience of it, which was just so intense.”The cameras captured that intensity. Though Chastain isn’t Mira and Isaac isn’t Jonathan, each drew on personal experience — their parents’ marriages, past relationships — in ways they never had. Sometimes work on the show felt like acting, and sometimes the work wasn’t even conscious. There’s a scene in the harrowing fourth episode in which they both lie crumpled on the floor, an identical stress vein bulging in each forehead.“It’s my go-to move, the throbbing forehead vein,” Isaac said on a follow-up video call last month. Chastain riffed on the joke: “That was our third year at Juilliard, the throb.”By then, it had been five months since the shoot wrapped. Life had returned to something like normal. Jokes were possible again. Both of them seemed looser, more relaxed. (Isaac had already poured himself one tequila shot and was ready for another.) No one cried.Chastain had watched the show with her husband. And Isaac, despite his initial reluctance, had watched it, too. It didn’t seem to have changed his experience.“I’ve never done anything like it,” he said. “And I can’t imagine doing anything like it again.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Gunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89She appeared in early classics like “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Virgin Spring” and devoted much of her long career to the stage.Gunnel Lindblom and Gunnar Björnstrand in Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1957 film “The Seventh Seal.” She appeared in several of his early films. Credit…Svensk Filmindustri, via PhotofestJan. 27, 2021, 5:04 p.m. ETGunnel Lindblom, a Swedish actress who worked with Ingmar Bergman in his early classic films and on decades of stage productions, died on Sunday in Brottby, Sweden, a small community north of Stockholm. She was 89.The death was announced by her family.In “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Bergman’s portrait of a knight (played by Max von Sydow) returning from the Crusades to find his village devastated by plague, Ms. Lindblom was an unnamed mute girl. At the film’s end, her character finally speaks, announcing biblically, “It is finished.”In “Wild Strawberries” (1957), about an elderly professor reflecting on life and loneliness, she was the man’s beautiful and kind sister in turn-of-the-century flashbacks.In “The Virgin Spring” (1960), Bergman’s tale of Christianity and revenge in medieval Sweden, Ms. Lindblom was a young, sullen, accidentally pregnant, Odin-worshiping servant girl of a wealthy landowner (also played by Mr. von Sydow). She witnesses the rape and brutal murder of his daughter, her spoiled but naïve teenage mistress.Ms. Lindblom’s professional relationship with Bergman, who died in 2007, continued and evolved. After “The Virgin Spring,” she appeared in two parts of his film trilogy about religion and faith: In “Winter Light” (1963), her character was a depressed fisherman’s wife; in “The Silence” (1964) she was a woman isolated with her dying sister in an unfamiliar foreign country.A decade later she had a supporting role in “Scenes From a Marriage,” Bergman’s Scandinavian mini-series, which starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and was released internationally as a feature film in 1974. Her character, Eva, is an attractive work colleague of the leading man.One of Ms. Lindblom’s seven screen directing credits was “Paradistorg,” a drama about a family getaway. When it was released in the United States in 1978 as “Summer Paradise,” Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times summed up the characters’ middle-class crises: “The women are lonely, the men are weaklings, and the children are growing up without proper supervision.”When Bergman directed “Ghost Sonata,” August Strindberg’s 1908 modernist play, at Dramaten in Stockholm at the turn of the millennium, Ms. Lindblom was cast as the Captain’s Wife, a beautiful woman who becomes a mummy.Strindberg, although he died in 1912, was perhaps the second most influential Swedish artist in her career; in recapping it, in fact, the first credit that some European obituaries mentioned was her title performance in a 1965 BBC production of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” his story of a wealthy young woman’s attraction to a servant. Ms. Lindblom received an honorary Guldbagge, Sweden’s Oscar equivalent, for lifetime achievement in 2002.Ms. Lindblom in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the 2009 Swedish film version of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel. It was her last high-profile movie role.Credit…AlamyGunnel Martha Ingegard Lindblom was born on Dec. 18, 1931, in Gothenburg (Goteborg), Sweden, and studied acting at the Gothenburg City Theater in the early 1950s.She made her film debut in Gustaf Molander’s “Karlek” (the English title was “Love”), a 1952 drama about a young priest, and collaborated frequently with Bergman at Malmo City Theater, where he had become artistic director.She had a busy six-decade theater career, most notably with the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, and played close to 60 screen roles — including Aunt Julie in “Hedda Gabler” (1993), the professor’s wife in “Uncle Vanya” (1967) and the ex-wife of a guilty choreographer in Susan Sontag’s “Brother Carl” (1971).She appeared in three recent film shorts (the last, “Bergman’s Reliquarium,” in 2018) and made a guest appearance on “The Inspector and the Sea,” a Swedish crime-drama series, in 2011. But her last high-profile screen role was in the Swedish film version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2009), based on Stieg Larsson’s best seller. (Two years later, an American version, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, was released.)In the Swedish film “Millennium” and in the 2010 American mini-series inspired by it, Ms. Lindblom played Isabella Vanger, the mother of the serial-killer antagonist. Isabella knew for years that her children were being sexually abused and said nothing.Ms. Lindblom and Sture Helander, a Swedish physician, married in 1960, had three children and divorced in 1970. In 1981, she married Frederik Dessau, the Danish film director and writer, and they divorced in 1986.No information on survivors was immediately available, but Ms. Lindblom had two sons, Thomas Helander and Jan Helander, and a daughter, Jessica Helander.Much of Ms. Lindblom’s career was devoted to theater, but she gladly acknowledged her love of filmmaking — sometimes just for the joy of shooting outdoors rather than being cooped up inside a theater, she said. And she had a particular appreciation for period films, partly because some managed to convey true timelessness.Watching contemporary films of the past, “you say, ‘Oh, that was made in the ’50s,’ ” she reflected in a 21st-century video interview. “But in a period film, if it’s well done, you don’t see when it’s made.”After all, the human condition itself is timeless.“I don’t think people have changed very much,” Ms. Lindblom said in the same interview, alluding to her medieval character in “The Virgin Spring.” “The feelings are very much the same. So you have to go for the truth.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More