This is a complex and multi-layered film about the creative process and the relationship of a married couple, both screenwriters, who stay on Faro Island, where the revered Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman made many of his best films.
Looking for inspiration for their next scripts they are shown into a house where Bergman lived, loved and made movies. Chris (Vicky Krieps, Phantom Thread) is unnerved by the idea of sleeping in the bed that was occupied by Bergman, who had nine children with six different partners. Scenes from a Marriage, the film which the proprietor says caused the divorce of millions of people, was conceived there.
They settle on separate spaces to write. Tony finds inspiration writing about how invisible things happen within a couple, while Chris misses their daughter who is staying with her grandparents, and has difficulty finding and ending to her story. And Tony is not helpful.
During their stay the better known Tony (Tim Roth) hosts a screening of one of his films and runs a masterclass for film students. Many of them go to an actual official Bergman Safari around the island.
There is a confusing film within a film. Fantasy and reality become blurred when Amy (Mia Waskowska Alice in Wonderland, Tracks) and Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), fictional characters from Chris’s story, meet, at a wedding, reinvigorating an old romance – and what occurs in real life spills over into art.
This is the seventh feature film for writer/director Mia Hansen-Love (Things to Come, Eden) which has intriguing and original ideas about what we reveal about ourselves.
108 minutes.
Showing at Luna Leederville from December 26th.
Watch the trailer…
