🎥Filmic Postcard: Sydney Film Festival 2022 (Part 2) The World of Apu

Apur Sansar | The World of Apu (1959) India

Directed by Satyajit Ray

The sublime world of Apu; beauty, love, tenderness, modernity, heartbreak and loss in an hour and 45 mins

What defines great cinema? Perhaps this question can be answered very simply: the universality of a good film is one that provokes a kind of emotional charge and renders the person watching the film to be affected by its contents; whist a great film transcends that emotive response and transforms it to one of wonder, as though one has been touched by something sublime.

This is what Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray’s films back in 1975:

The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race, which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. … I feel that he is a “giant” of the movie industry. Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon. I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it (Pather Panchali). It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river. People are born, live out their lives, and then accept their deaths. Without the least effort and without any sudden jerks, Ray paints his picture, but its effect on the audience is to stir up deep passions. How does he achieve this? There is nothing irrelevant or haphazard in his cinematographic technique. In that lies the secret of its excellence.*

The World of Apu is a world that seems so removed from where I was sitting, in a comfortable viewing chair at the Art Gallery of NSW’s subterranean theatre amongst the 80 or so patrons at Satyajit Ray’s Retrospective of the Sydney Film Festival 2022. And yet…so much of what comes alive on the luminous screen bears a resemblance of a life I am deeply invested in, I cannot look away, the simplicity and above all, the beauty in the way Apu and his new bride, Aparna, fan each other as they’re eating, renders their love palpable and alive. This is real cinema. The artistry and magic makes the many scenes in this film deeply spellbinding – it is as though I am seeing the moon for the first time and can do little but be bewitched by its allure.

In addition to this, I was profoundly moved to read that this restoration made possible by the collaboration (and I’m sure love and meticulous work) of Janus Films, the Harvard Film Archive, BFI and the Academy, that we are able to see this film at all…there was a fire in the studio where they were restoring ‘The Apu Trilogy’ back in 1993 and the original negatives were badly burnt and deemed unsalvageable. It wasn’t until 2013 before technology had improved to a stage where they were able to work with the damaged materials, using a solution to rehydrate what remained and then repair the film frame by frame with negatives from other archives around the world. This proved to be a successful and worthy cause, and for that, we must say our deepest thanks.

First time actor Soumitra Chatterjee as Apu

The World of Apu is the last of the trilogy: Apu is now in his early twenties, idealistic and sincere; he is happy with his impoverished existence, even if he has to sell his beloved books to pay the long overdue rent. Satyajit Ray’s world is an amorphous one where lives bleed into each other; driven by a new world that embraces progress – carried through by the metaphor of the train as it charges through the landscape without remorse or consideration (it runs over a pig, which could very well have been a person); as with all new enterprises, the only way is forward, and the speed of this arrow is with specific aim and a little joyless; all this, is set against the backdrop of Subrata Mitra starkly photographed landscapes; desolate stretches, the bare railway tracks, a few roaming animals, the rubble and fragments around a crumbling old world; and yet, set in the foreground are clusters of hope formed in the accumulation of the many byways of crisscrossing relationships, Ray situates us in this intimate world made up of friendships and family; whose bonds cannot be broken even if one is years or miles apart from each other, we find that our philosophy of life shows us the way through an advancing wilderness.

In this world, in Apu’s world, the screech of the train is unbearable, Aparna also reacts by blocking her ears with her hands and shutting her eyes to block out its presence. The human condition, on the other hand, is highly prized; where Apu’s naive view of the world is counterbalanced by his act of ‘self-sacrifice’, saving Aparna’s honour by marrying her; and Aparna in return makes a home of his one room bachelor flat, gifting him her tenderness and her wonderful presence. They make each other. 

Sharmila Tagore as Aparna (left) and Apu are magical on screen

It’s incredible to think that both leads are played by non actors (as with the roles of Pulu and Kamal) and for both actors, this is their first film. Soumitra Chatterjee as Apu made a career of it, as he went on to make more than 300 films, and Sharmila Tagore as Aparna (only fourteen years old at the time) has an incredible on-screen presence; she is related to the Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. There’s something magical captured on screen between Apu and Aparna; something that is entirely human and totally believable. You find yourself falling in love with them. It can be said that Apu is likened to Krishna, he plays the flute, he is filled with humanity and humility, with doubts and downfalls too, his love of learning, of life and for his wife; he is a beacon to our current shipwrecked shores, against war, greed and impatience. Watching this film, one yearns for a simpler life, free from materiality, perhaps more rightly, a return to authenticity. But what the film teaches us is perhaps that there can still be freedom within the responsibilities one is prepared to take in life. 

Lastly, the music, it is a character of its own right in the film, haunting and graceful, other worldly and emotively stirring…Ravi Shankar first worked with Ray in late 1954 (the two had known each other for ten years at that stage) when he composed the music to the first film of the Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali. Composed and recorded in a single session through the night until 4am to selected scenes that Ray was projected for him. For that film, Shankar used traditional Indian instruments including the tarshehnai, the bhimraj, and the sarod, as well as the pakhwaj for percussion and a flute; and bestowed Ray with such a vast array of music of varying tonal qualities that Ray reshot a new scene (the dance of the water bugs) just to showcase Shankar’s music. With The World of Apu, Shankar had more time to devote to the film, and even brought in western instruments, including the piano, violins and cellos during the three day recording session. Shankar, already a huge star in India, became a superstar around the world after his now legendary set at the Monterey Pop Festival back in 1967. The Guardian in 2007 named The 50 greatest film soundtracks of all time and placed Shankar’s Pather Panchali at number four on this list.

*Kurosawa’s quote was from Ryan Lattanzio’s piece in Indiewire. 

#sydneyfilmfestival was on from the 8th-19th June 2022.
#filmfestivaleveryday #filmoftheday #jandnfilmfestival

 

🎥Filmic Postcard: Sydney Film Festival 2022 (Part 1) Tchaikovsky’s Wife

Zhena Chaikovskogo | Tchaikovsky’s Wife (2022) Russia, France, Switzerland

Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov

Alyona Mikhailova as Antonina Miliukova, aka Tchaikovsky’s wife eavesdropping on her husband’s music lesson

Whilst I haven’t seen writer director Kirill Serebrennikov’s film from last year Petrov’s Flu (2021) that received much attention, I did catch his earlier film The Student (2016) on one of the streaming services a few years ago. Although I don’t remember much of the storyline, a moody and brooding sense of the film remained…and the same can be said about Tchaikovsky’s Wife, a film that draws you into a kind of fever-dream, spiralic, toxic and in this instance, of the paradoxical undressing kind: where one is seized by hallucinations and inhibition before death overwhelms body and mind.

The ‘confrontation’ with Odin Lund Biron as Tchaikovsky

Serebrennikov’s Tchaikovsky’s Wife has all the hallmarks of an epic film, with its gorgeous period costumes, splendid interiors, the mise-en-scène is opulent in mood and tone, either created by natural light or by golden candle-lit interiors and, not to mention its 2 hour 23 minute run time. This latter fact may have put off some audiences (and critics), hence the many reviews that described the film as repetitive or mundane. 

Let’s strip back all the veneer; this is not a film about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the man, the pianist, the world famous composer of beloved ballets (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, to name but a few), no please, it is a film about Antonina Miliukova, aka Tchaikovsky’s wife – the name unknown to many, including myself. And her introduction is by way of her more famous husband. Although in real life she is once removed, Antonina is, however, centre stage in this film. And as a woman watching this film, I found her insufferable moments, the long dregs of boredom, the day prolonged and stretched beyond recognition, of ennui and dystopia, is but of a life imagined, of women, in that epoch. 

Sham marriage for a beautiful bride

The colour palette that describes her milieu is like that of a barley field, a mix of washed stone and muted grass, she is washed out and faded; the shine of her husband surpasses her non-existent life, which is made more lowly by the instilled behaviour of that period; and so her retreat into a kind of demi-madness and ‘hysterical’ stupor is all but standard fare (I’m using the word hysteria here because this was the common description of women who exhibited any kind of outward emotion in those days, I imagine that audiences today would simply see her behaviour as one of the every day). 

The dreamic Sokurov-like sequence

There are many levels of invention in Serebrennikov’s dreamic film: where some sequences are reminiscent, in both lighting and cinematography, as that of Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), the camera trailing behind Antonina (an astonishing performance by Alyona Mikhailova) as she frantically forces her way into a restaurant in search of her husband, months after he has deserted her. Vladislav Opelyants’ cinematography is fluid, febrile, inventive and immaculate. 

Their marriage was never meant to be: what it was meant to be was a sham marriage; of convenience to Tchaikovsky, who preferred men to women and of a self-seduction on Antonina’s part – an obsession of this great man that led her away from her small but secure life as a professional seamstress, to study music under Tchaikosvky’s tutelage at the Moscow Music Conservatory before professing her love for him in a couple of letters when she was well past the ‘marrying  age’ for women at the time: then bingo, he marries her. They only managed to stay together for 6 weeks (or 2 ½ months) before their disparate temperaments and psychologies drove Tchaikovsky permanently away. Like the fly that antagonised Tchaikovsky during their first meeting at her flat, (this fly motif recurs throughout the film) their relationship is symbolised by an insect that instils in us a sole instinct to shoo it away, or better yet, to swat it. The fly also conjures up the idea of annoyance, pestilence and death; and symbolises malice, neglect or decay.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) with his wife Antonina Miliukova in 1877 from the Collection of State P. Tchaikovsky

The replication of that photographic moment in Serebrennikov’s film

Despite the interesting chapters described in letters and biography (written by his brother, Modest) of Tchaikovsky’s very obvious and malicious hatred of Antonina, Serebrennikov’s film showed a woman of who had two faces; one in which she lived in a daydream of being Tchaikovsky’s wife, adored, venerated and perhaps even loved by her husband in the way she loved and worshipped him; and the other, the devastation that was wrecked by a lovesick myopic woman, who ended up in a sordid and unhappy affair with her divorce lawyer.

The Antonina men

This kind of wretchedness produced a woman that led Serebrennikov’s film to its creative heights. The opening sequence had Tchaikovsky literally rising from the dead (it was at his deathbed viewing) to berate Antonina for daring to show up at his funeral. Their marriage reception was described as a ‘funeral’ by Antonina’s sister, where Tchaikovsky only had eyes for his friend, and fed him, not his bride, morsels of the wedding feast. Once the root of Antonina’s misery has taken a hold of her body and soul, this was when she fully becomes Tchaikovsky’s wife, we see her in another sequence where she was asked to take her pick of a careful selection of handsome men having been handpicked for their distinctive looks and physique especially for her, who having undressed in the room and paying her their full attention, waited to be chosen. Antonina considered each one with a discerning eye, like that of a farmer selecting their prized bull and then, having examined each one, but selecting none, her only response was to remain in the room with all of them and to close the door to the camera. The Antonina men were to appear in a fantastical operatic dance sequence at the climax of the film towards the end. I’ve always loved these kinds of interludes in films and was not disappointed. 

Fever-dream as an operatic dance sequence

Oh, for those who wanted to know about Tchaikovsky (played misogynistically here by Odin Lund Biron), there are a number of documentaries available, including the recent highly-rated BBC drama Tchaikovsky: The Tragic Life of a Musical Genius and of course Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers with Richard Chamberlain (who is, incidentally, an accomplished pianist) as the great man himself. However, I would suggest to best get to ‘know’ Tchaikovsky through his music, think Eugene Onegin or his Piano Concerto No. 1 (though I can’t now unsee the image of Chamberlain’s performance of said piece in my mind’s eye).

#sydneyfilmfestival was on from the 8th – 19th June 2022.

#filmfestivaleveryday #filmoftheday #jandnfilmfestival

 

🎥 Filmic Postcard: from the 2021 Sydney Film Festival: (Part 2) Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and The Story of My Wife

Gûzen to sôzô | Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) 

Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

A feleségem története | The Story of My Wife (2021) 

Directed by Ildikó Enyedi

First Segment: Magic (Or Something Less Reassuring)

For those who are unfamiliar with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s works, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is very much of the realm of Haruki Murakami’s short stories; three vignettes that ruminate on the themes of love, betrayal, chance encounters and coincidences. 

I was lucky enough to catch one of Hamaguchi’s film, Asako I & II which was screening on Stan about 2 years ago. It had a dreamy quality: elliptical and haunting, the story stayed with me for a number of days and although I can’t recall the storyline in detail, that feeling still remains when I think of this film.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy aims to create those kinds of connections and feelings, and succeeds especially well in the last of the three vignettes. And unlike Rohmer, (the director cites him as his main influence), his stories seem to have a less sunny disposition. 

Saving grace or the ability to end a fantasy

The three stories have their own distinctive narratives, casts and impulse; and each are a self contained exploration of the human psyche. The first piece is called Magic (Or Something Less Reassuring) and unfortunately I found that for the first 15 or so minutes the screen was too dark, and I saw virtually nothing…either the key light was not set correctly (which I doubt) or the cinema (Dendy Newtown) had not calibrated it’s screens properly. The simple two-shot sequence in the cab was obscured and that made it hard to establish a character’s motive or intent without any ability to see their faces, to read their eyes. The saving grace was at the end of this segment – where fantasy ends.

Post-coital talk

The three stories are mainly two-handers and work extremely well as chamber pieces heightening the melodrama that unfolds, sometimes in real life, and sometimes within our mind’s eye. The only clue that provides a connective thread across the pieces is Robert Schumann’s Of Foreign Lands and Peoples played extra-diegetically on the piano (as though someone is practising), and this earworm so far has not left me. A beautiful rendition of this piece played by the great Martha Argerich when she performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker at 73 years of age can be found here; and boy, can she play! She still has the most graceful and lightness of touch).

Second Segment: Door Wide Open with Kiyohiko Shubukawa in the foreground

This piece of music perfectly describes each of their encounters, as human endeavours and behaviour are generally strange and foreign, even when we’re in the act of thinking or doing something, we never consider its strangeness except in hindsight. And whilst it all makes sense at the time, like those stolen moments between love-making in the second story Door Wide Open, where anything promised is possible, and any attempt at realising these promises should, of their own accord, take on its own impulse and may even develop into something special. But in hindsight, we all know that these actions, tempting as they may be, will ultimately lead to an unfortunate demise for those involved. It is written. The story notwithstanding, in this segment Kiyohiko Shubukawa was fantastic as the deadpan professor and novelist. 

Third Segment: Once Again

And for those who come together unexpectedly, such as the two women in the last segment, Once Again, they may find an altogether a different ending to the one they set out to achieve. It is through these small moments of observations and dialogue that Hamaguchi reinvents the episodic genre, and you come away with the feeling of having experienced, visually, a Murakami collection of short stories. 

To get to a deeper understanding of this film (without further spoilers) there is a really good interview of the director from this year’s NYFF here.

Léa Seydoux‘s Lizzy and Gils Naber‘s Captain Störr – at a time when they were very much in love.

Ever since I saw Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul and heard her speak about her film at the SFF back in 2017 (it took out the SFF Award for Best Film that year), I have been full of admiration for this director and her very unique way of relating the magical realism of nature, in particular, animals, to her narratives and, of course, to us, the very extraordinary thing of being human. 

I found The Story of My Wife to have that same enchanted quality, but with a maturation of perspective and treatment of a similar subject matter. Sure, we can say that this film is a story about love, or about a man (a Sea Captain) and his wife (the first woman who walked through the door on that fateful day). But can women and men ever really understand each other? Because falling in love, or loving another person is altogether a different matter. 

Attraction + love = desire

The greatest folly of mankind is our ability to be influenced by love’s tidal tempers, and our greatest extenuative is our inability to understand this profound sentiment and our ineptitude in our search for its yearning. 

Or perhaps what is to be found in the oscillation between these two states, (alas, these two worlds), of being in the state of love (the swoon that sweeps you off your feet), to the way we need overcome it; is by way of creating misdirections, seeding doubts, mythmaking; all in order to break the same bonds we so desire, lest our hearts may never recover from them.

All is clear…the Captain and his wife at nightfall

For those critics who have given this film and it’s glorious 2 hours and 49 mins a thumbs down review, I dare say, have not the patience or subtlety to truly want to grasp at the mysterious heart of the story: that Otherness is an essential and constitutional part of the formulation of Self. The Other is always mysterious and cannot be otherwise. All we can do, is to take delight in navigating in the unknown waters in between.

The story unfolds in a series of episodes, each with a chapter heading, the last one is “On Letting Go”. Adapted from a novel of the same name The Story of My Wife: The Reminiscences Of Captain Störr by early 20th Century Hungarian writer, Milán Füst. 

Ildikó Enyedi’s film transports us to another time, with Imola Lang’s gorgeous production design – the 20s and 30s set pieces offer up a centre of balance. But the home is the loci of both love and illicit thoughts, a husband and wife’s private space is also that of their scene of confrontations.

On mirrored shores, what reflects is also what separates…

For Léa Seydoux, her Lizzy was always true to her husband, Captain Jakob Störr, played by the handsome and Viking-like Dutch actor Gijs Naber, but she is totally mysterious to him. She was the Eve of dry land, and all Störr could do was to dream with the sperm whales ‘standing’ vertically in the water. These deep ocean sirens sleep standing up, and Störr is at one with their songs. He walks on land as a man, but has a heart of a whale. His dream literally came true when he declared he was going to marry the first woman who stepped through the door, and he did. 

A sperm whale pod sleeping.

The homely setting, the hearth, the chaise and a reclining Lizzy reading, this scene welcomed the sailor back as though he was Ulysses, and her, Penelope. After all, this home was in Paris, and she has not yet been displaced to Hamburg. 

In any case, Lizzy is ambivalent, and that perhaps is her charm after all, to set aflutter all the hearts of men (and women) who come across her path. But she is very much the faithful wife to Störr, whether he saw it or not, understood it or not, believed it or not. Her small jibes “what an absurd thing to say”, or “what a ridiculous notion”, were her only defence of the deeper wounds his suspicions and jealousy drove into her, (he did try to strangle her), and perhaps as an aggrieved woman, there was simply not a way to express this feeling except to be a creature of contradiction: contemptuous (pushing idly, inch by inch, the ink well until it falls off the edge of the table), charming (coming home tipsy and proud of the fact of having spent a good evening out), and sensual (dancing in front of mirror when no one was watching). That was the person whom Störr fell in love with.

Before the ink well hits the ground.

But for Störr, unfaithfulness, just like trafficking illegal goods, is a common affair. Hints abound throughout the early parts of the film eluding to his shipmates’ having a ‘wife’ at every port. Though he confessed of having ‘no wife’, but later, having given up his seafaring days (partly to keep an eye on Lizzy), his own calculated ways made him think the worst of his wife. And Louis Garrel’s dandy, Dedin, affronted the worst in him. He has still to learn how to sing Lizzy’s siren song.

The awareness of the Other…it’s a matter of playing it out.

And later, when Störr mistook his own indiscretion for love, having been attracted to Grete (Luna Wedler from the fantastic German Netflix series, Biohacker), he wanted to take their stolen relationship further. But Grete knew it to be useless, she was “like him” she said, with a truthful heart; and we know it was her innocence that spoke. She was already in a double bind whether she saw it or not. To be his mistress (it doesn’t matter that he asked her to marry him – as an audience, we knew he meant to have two wives), or to be without him. 

Luna Wedler as Grete, innocent and in love.

There was to only be one eternal ending to this story. A sequence towards the end of the film was of Störr holding a posy of violets and standing at the back of a tram. As it pulled away from the cafe he was at earlier (where he had eyed a girl who had caught his fancy), he sees her, Lizzy. The said posy falls from his hands. The beautiful blue violet that symbolises modesty and faithfulness, and also of remembrance; and in Shakespeare – of sorrow and death. This single gesture tied to this flower tells the entire story of Captain Störr and his wife.

Remembrance, sorrow and modesty. Edouard Manet’s: Bouquet of violets, 1872

The Sydney Film Festival finishes today on the 14th November.

#sff #sydneyfilmfestival2021 #sydneyfilmfestival

 

🎥 Filmic Postcard: from the 2021 Sydney Film Festival (Part 1) : Bergman Island

Bergman Island (2021) 

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

The creative process is often joyless. It is in fact a solitary joylessness. 

It’s also easy to confuse productivity or the flow that one finds in ‘doing work’ with the process of writing or scripting. The two are not the same. In fact, one can produce a huge body of work without any artistry.

I’m also not speaking of the collaborative process of a shoot either.

I remember reading a Joan Chen interview years ago, where she had said that “a happy home is the enemy to art”. I am paraphrasing here, but you get the gist. 

Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island seeps under your skin, and envelopes you with a kind of malaise borne of sadness. And unlike her earlier works All is Forgiven (2007) or The Father of My Children (2009), two films where I found her fragility and sensitivity as a storyteller and director to possess the lightest of touch, that even with a difficult and tragic storyline, something magical and radiant comes out in the films. And again, later with Eden (2014), her magical touch is all the more pronounced, there’s a subtlety to the way she layers her narrative and intersects complex relationships. 

Vicky Krieps as Chris (left) and Tim Roth as Tony (right) discussing which Bergman film they should view that evening in the private 35mm screening room.

I found Bergman Island to be none of these things. There was something more stoic and passive, but also confident in this film. Perhaps part of the confidence came from the way Tim Roth’s character Tony, a famous director Anthony Sanders, spoke and acted; that he was productive (he’s always talking, projecting himself), in the way he drove his car (that he didn’t slow down even when he arrived at the destination), in the general way that he handled himself (with his lover, with colleagues he’s trying to impress, with his fans). He is the epitome of Deleuze’s ‘action-image’, a man on the move and seemingly to propel the story forwards. The films he makes are also centered on ‘strong’ female leads in ‘action’, his post-film screening discussion was cut short by his partner’s exit from the stadium. A closing of the door took us in a more rhizomatic direction; we get to follow her, instead.

Chris – solitary self-discovery or invention?

We are led into another perspective, his partner’s. Chris is sensitively played by Vicky Krieps (I only saw her in Anderson’s Phantom Thread years ago but have not forgotten her on-screen presence). She is more subtle in her confidence, she is outspoken, independent, and deeply thoughtful. Her ‘inaction’ (in the sense that she finds it difficult to progress her script) in fact outweighs and artistically surpasses the momentum that Tony seem to exude. Her story is one that bifurcates, in a film within a film; about a young writer / director, Amy, (played by Mia Wasikowska, who was actually here at the SFF screening on Sunday night) who also heads out to Fårö Island (like Chris and Tony), but for her, it is to attend a wedding of her friend. On the way there, she meets up, quite by chance, her ex-lover Joseph, (played by the wonderful Anders Danielsen Lie, I saw him last in this brilliant film Oslo, 31st August (2011); or you may know him from the recent television series Seizure which is currently available on SBS on Demand) whom she has not been able to get over. No spoilers here, but there is a lot of unresolved tension that needs to play out between the two friends.

Mia Wasikowska as Amy in a moment of spontaneity

Anders Danielsen Lie as Joseph, Amy’s ex-lover – is it possible to truly get over your great love?

For Chris and Tony, they have travelled to Fårö Island to take on a writer’s residence. It is an island situated in the north east of Gotland, and where Ingmar Bergman had lived and worked for many years. He made some of his most famous films there: Persona (1966), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and the actual house Chris and Tony were staying in was where Scenes from a Marriage (1973) was shot, not to mention the bed they stayed in; some of the scenes, such as the front-on shot of the bed with Tony holding a book reading, made me, as well as Chris, giggle in delight. But that was at the start of the film.

Scenes from a Marriage, the formidable Liv Ullmann as Marianne and Erland Josephson as Johan

There were a lot of pressure-points that Hansen-Løve toyed with; by placing her audience in a mirror-maze, she creates a kind of fluid ambiguity that blends fiction and real life, reinterpretation and impulse, critique and factual. I would bet that audiences would be asking themselves these questions right the way through the film. Is this a reflection of the director’s own personal story that we see in Chris – being overshadowed by her partner who is a more prolific director, like that of her relationship with Assayas, or is Amy actually Chris’ double? Or, is it in fact that everyone involved in this film, are in fact in the shadow of (and yet continually and alternately inspired and haunted by) the ghost of yet another more luminous director, that of Ingmar Bergman. 

Bergman used to write directly onto his bedside table when he woke in the middle of the night.

After all, this is Bergman’s island so to speak, and I guess, also Wallander country (in many of the scenes, I can’t help but see Kurt there with his dog Jussi). One can only take so much of the sea and sky, the landscape and it’s climes demand a slowness. This, coupled with the austere interiors come together to drive a kind of conformity that presses against those who go there. And those like Chris and Tony who supposedly went to be creative, or, at least, to embrace the quietness; I would say an opposite effect came to bear, “it’s oppressive” noted Chris; and to me, it is stifling, like the ticking clock; and drives in despair instead. But something did happen, something ‘clicked’, Chris found her own ‘safari’ into her creativity and narrative of and at Fårö Island. The idea of getting lost here is perhaps the best means of arrival.

How do you find room for love and creative freedom in a relationship?

To compartmentalise an interiority requires both solitude and validation. For Tony, his validation came from the effusive praise of his admiring public and festival organisers. For Chris, by sharing her story with Tony, the horizon was painted in the process. For her, she was unable to like a director’s films if they do not “behave” in their personal life. And this, I guess was the unspoken chasm that splits them; and in doing so, also open up the question of whether it is possible to separate the artist with the person? (How do you separate Heidegger from his allegiances.) 

Tournage: shooting in the library inside Bergman‘s house

Without diving into this debate here, there were also many moments where you could still find a glimpse of Hansen-Løve’s magical touches: when Amy wakes as Chris, or when Chris visits Bergman’s house and finds her friend there instead, listening to music; or our fateful rendezvous with Ingmar Bergman Jnr at the crossing. And for those moments, I am content.

The Sydney Film Festival finishes today on the 14th November.

There’s a wonderful 5 part working diary by the cinematographer, Denis Lenoir on the Bergman Island shoot here. 

#filmfestivaleveryday  #filmoftheday #jandnfilmfestival

From left: Director Ingmar Bergman, cinematographer Sven Nykvist, ASC and actors Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann on Fårö in the 1960s. (Photo by Allen Watkin from London, UK, via Wikipedia Commons)