 Day 18, Bergman Island, suggested by Phil Bates of the bourgeoisie. I have written two feature-length screenplays. The first, ironically titled Family Values, is trash. Like on a purely conceptual level is bad for society. I haven't read it since my first year of college, but I remember too much of it too vividly. Like, I understand why I wrote it, and I'm angry that I did. The second I've talked about more than a few times on this channel, Daylight. A cabin in the woods, a little spookfest that I've been writing on and off since 2014. Daylight's not bad for society. I'd really like to make it someday, but I don't know what to do with that. When Andrew Garfield, as Jonathan Larson, finally showed supervia to some Broadway hot shots and tick tick boom, and then talked to his agent about it, he told him to start working on the next one, because that's the way it goes. Yeah, I have spent years on this script that at this point I have a deep attachment to, but so what? Mia Hansen Love had the idea for Bergman Island rattling around in her head for far longer than I've had Daylight though. She knew she wanted to make a film about married directors, let's call it inspired by her life and marriage to Olivier Asseyes. But it wasn't until the death of Ingmar Bergman in 2007 that she felt she had a frame for it. It would be another 14 years before the world would see it. There have been a lot of high-profile deaths recently. Some barely register, while others feel like real losses. Being a high school student at the time and one whose cinematic tastes were not nearly as worldly as they'd become, I didn't hear about it. I hadn't even heard of him. But of course I would go on to write a paper about through a glass darkly and art cinema for a film history course that I'm sure had some incredibly obnoxious name but though I found the paper its cover page has been lost to time. I skimmed it and it made me want to die. It's good movie though. I mean there's a reason Bergman is so revered as a filmmaker if not necessarily as a human being as Bergman Island points out fairly early on. The film is set on Farrow where Bergman lived until his death and also shot several of his films, the first of which was Through a Glass Darkly. Our protagonist, Chris, has come because her husband, Tony, was invited to screen his latest film and participate in some panels and what have yous at some like Bergman adjacent festival or something but it's not a vacation for her. She is trying to figure out her next script and thought maybe this idyllic place would help her get some creative juices flowing. Being married to a man who is so successful and for whom writing seems to come so easily is deeply frustrating for her. She looks secretly at the pages and pages of words and notes and kind of unsettling drawings that he has put down for his latest project that he won't talk to her about while hers remain nearly blank. But she does come up with a story eventually once set on that very island and so at some point this film director inspired by her creator begins to tell the tale of her own self insert having a different experience in the same place and we see it. It's a fairly jarring turn of the realization that the movie we've been watching is kind of the framework for this other different movie that we're watching now and at times they mirror each other visually and others they just seem to fill in each other's emotional gaps. Hanson Love has admitted in interviews that each of these characters is like a side of her and you can tell sometimes it feels kind of like watching a therapy session. Interestingly while they had intended to film all of this stuff together the real scenes were shot a full year after the movie within a movie because of some last minute casting issues and I would imagine that seeing how it came together actually helped shape the frame as well. I wonder if Tony's early line to someone on the phone about losing half the cast wasn't a remark pointed at some producer somewhere down the line and while I imagine that it was very stressful in the moment it doesn't show. I would have never known that Tim Roth and Vicki Creeps weren't Hanson Love's first choices. Creeps is the standout obviously given that she has to almost single-handedly carry the film's dramatic weight but I've always liked Roth as a performer and I think he walks the fine line of being a you know helpful guy who wants to give his wife the space she clearly needs to be and express herself while also being a self-absorbed creative who is mostly focused on his own work. Everyone's great in this honestly which is good because a lot of it is really just pure performance there are so many moments where characters are alone or together but in silence or what have you and it's just about existing there and you feel the tension and the frustration and the love and the happiness and the everything in between because while the stakes here are pretty small they mean a lot to the people involved stakes only really feel small when they're someone else's you know but Bergman Island doesn't really dwell on that it doesn't dwell on much at all characters certainly do but the film continues on because there's always something new to see and if not that then certainly a new way of seeing something old. I should watch Persona again 7.0 out of 10. Thanks so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons my mom hammering Marco, Kat Saracada, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I Am The Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylorland Deese, Andrew Madison Design and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video it's great if not oh well if you want to see more uh suggest what I'll talk about in three days and uh the thank you. Bye!