Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is a lovely rumination on life, love, relationships, and art – as well as the ways in which all of these can intersect and collide in the cinema. The very structure and framework of the film – and the meta-narrative surrounding its genesis – invites us to explore the power of cinema and art as tools we can use to refract our experiences and reshape them into something that, while it might resemble lived events, is something far more powerful and profound. The act of telling this story of filmmakers romantically involved and setting it on the island that Ingmar Bergman called home invites reflections on the latitude given to male artists and the burdens placed on women – just seeing the way that Tony is mobbed by admirers after a lecture while Chris is virtually ignored only drives home the point. Hansen-Løve also invites us to inhabit Chris’s creative process as the narrative folds in on itself at the film’s midpoint – becoming the unfinished fragment of a film that Chris describes to Tony before shifting into work on the film itself and then back into the work of writing it in the present. It’s glorious and elegant and simple – capturing what it is to create and the struggles (and joys) of sharing your life with another artist.