We discuss French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s newest film Bergman Island and her 2016 film, Things to Come. We analyze both films’ shared themes of women in existential crises, the passage of time, and the speed of change.
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This episode features Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney, Executive Editor Orla Smith, Associate Editor Brett Pardy, and special guest Emily Garside.
Bergman Island (2021)
Vicky Krieps stars as Chris, a filmmaker who is staying on Faro Island with her director partner, Tony (Tim Roth), for a residency to work on her next film. For the first half of the film, the pair separately work, explore the island, and exchange small intimacies like dinners out together, brushing their teeth, and watching a Bergman movie in Ingmar Bergman’s cinema. Midway through the film, Chris decides to tell Tony about the screenplay she’s working on, and as she narrates, the film she’s working on comes to life, with Mia Wasikowska playing Amy and Anders Danielsen Lie as Amy’s paramour. The pair are on Faro island for three days for a wedding. They were teenage lovers but the feelings never disappeared, and this is the last chapter in their love story.
Bergman Island will be available on VOD beginning October 22.
Things to Come (2016)
Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) is a high school philosophy teacher who spends her time, when not teaching, publishing prestigious philosophy books, seeing her two grown children, taking care of her difficult mother, and spending time with her husband, Heinz (André Marcon). When Heinz announces he’s leaving her for another woman, she’s shocked but seems more crushed about the books of hers he takes with him than the end of their marriage. Soon, she has to say goodbye to the house she spent summers at with her family, put her mother in care, and then deal with her mother’s death. Suddenly, at middle age, she says she has found her freedom. She goes to visit a former student, Fabien (Roman Kolinka), a PhD dropout who now lives in the country, works at a small press, and has somewhat, from her perspective, anarchistic ideals. Before she knows it, time has passed, wounds have healed, and her daughter has given birth.
Things to Come is available on DVD and VOD.
Show Notes
- Register for The Seventh Circle, a symposium on gender, sexuality, and disability in horror cinema.
- Sign up for updates on the first book to ever be published on the films of Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier
- Read Elena Lazic’s interview with Mia Hansen-Løve about her 2019 film Maya
- Read Lindsay Pugh’s discussion of Vicky Krieps and Mia Wasikowska in Bergman Island
- Bergman Island was our 4th favourite film of TIFF 2021. See the other 19 choices here.
Related Episodes
- Ep. 109: TIFF 2021, part 1
- Ep. 103: Pascal Plante’s Films: Fake Tattoos and Nadia Butterfly
- Ep. 44: Shirley and portraits of female artists (Members only)
- Ep. 27: Comparing Little Women adaptations
- Ep. 21: Feminist horror
- Ep. 14: The Souvenir and the films of Joanna Hogg
