In competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, Bergman Island, with its scenaristic mise en abyme, has everything to inspire at the start: a French director with a quivering sensitivity (Young love, Eden), its setting on the Swedish island of Farö, where Swedish director Ingmar Bergman lived for a long time.
Magnificent camera, inspired music, gap between a couple of filmmakers: he (Tim Roth) established, sure of himself, she (Vicky Krieps), young, full of quests and doubts; from the outset, privacy of tone is given.
This pilgrimage to the master of Fanny and Alexandre, whose tutelary shadow is called to nourish their inspiration, but which the sun drags on the summer roads, opens with a film within the film: the scenario of the young woman who wants to emancipate herself from the heavy husband, here staged.
Love lost and found
But where the fragility of the couple is captured with finesse in their imbalance, the film produced in counterpoint has nothing to arouse passions with its banal story of love lost and found.
So that instead of gently multiplying the references to Bergman, this parallel story weighs down the game.
There remain the dazzling scenery and landscapes, a touch of realization, the grace of the heroine, the inhabited grunts of Tim Roth.
Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve plays on the keyboard of reality and fiction with nostalgia for feelings left behind, without really finding where to put them. We come out in search of a miracle that did not take place.