Movie review by Greg Carlson

Céline Sciamma follows “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” – arguably her best film in an already sensational career – with “Petite Maman,” a lovely reminder of the filmmaker’s interest in themes of childhood, transitions, and liminality. At a perfect 72 minutes, “Petite Maman” is Sciamma’s shortest feature to date. A number of observers, as well as the filmmaker herself, have pointed out the movie’s thematic similarities to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, and it is not difficult to imagine “Petite Maman,” with its generous sprinkling of magic dust, as an animated fairy tale from Studio Ghibli.

The great strength of “Petite Maman” blooms from Sciamma’s straightforward treatment of the experiences of protagonist Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), a child experiencing grief and confusion following the death of her grandmother. Accompanying her parents to clean out the house where Nelly’s mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) grew up, Nelly meets a little girl building a fort in the adjacent woods. This neighbor, who is also named Marion, is the mirror image of Nelly and is played by Sanz’s twin sister Gabrielle. As the action unfolds, the viewer ponders the nature of this curious doppelganger.

Is this new playmate real or something conjured from Nelly’s imagination? Are young Marion and older Marion one and the same? Are we in the territory of “Back to the Future,” in which time travel allows a child to meet a parent when the two would be the same age? Sciamma places Nelly’s spiritual and emotional growth at the forefront of the story, skipping any explanations for the supernatural impossibility right before our eyes. Nelly accepts Marion as her mother-to-be, taking the opportunity to develop a deeper and richer understanding of the person Marion was, once upon a time.

Sciamma was one of the four screenwriters who worked on the adaptation of Gilles Paris’s “Autobiographie d’une Courgette,” and the sensitivity she brings to the inner lives of young people carries over to her new film. In an interview with Lillian Crawford, Sciamma acknowledged that she considered animation as an option for “Petite Maman” while she was promoting “Courgette,” but in the end, we are fortunate for the warm autumnal charm of the live action edition that ended up being made. Sciamma has spoken about her admiration for “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” as a film that “changed the way” that she looks at cinema, and the visual rhymes and echoes made by the Sanz twins are doubled by the filmmaker’s Lynchian introduction of duplicate houses.

Many of us have felt as if we missed the opportunity to express a perfect goodbye to someone we thought we might see again. Nelly’s own frustration and regret at not getting her own farewell to her grandmother just right is compounded by what she perceives is her inability to properly comfort her mother, who leaves the house while Nelly is asleep. In older Marion’s absence, young Marion materializes, giving Nelly the opportunity to understand her mom not as a parent but as a peer. Sciamma’s handling of the interactions between the kids is as confident and as beautifully realized as the depiction of relationships in “Water Lilies,” “Tomboy,” and “Girlhood.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The final film in Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, “The Worst Person in the World” is one of the best films of 2021. Despite several erroneous descriptions from critics tagging the movie as a romantic comedy, the film most assuredly belongs in the more temperamental sibling genre of romantic drama. Trier’s latest is not without humor, warmth, and wit, but its concerns stretch toward darkness, transience and melancholia. Told in a dozen chapters bookended by a prologue and epilogue, “The Worst Person in the World” is anchored by Renate Reinsve’s sensational central performance. It’s a long shot that Reinsve’s Best Actress honor at Cannes will translate to an Oscar nomination, but she would have my vote.

Reinsve plays Julie, a restless young medical student who impulsively switches to psychology before abandoning that subject for photography (much to her mother’s pursed-lip chagrin). Julie’s youth, beauty and intelligence, Trier illustrates, place her in the catbird seat; her indecision operates as the central feature of the film’s early sections. David Ehrlich puts it perfectly: “If Julie is less of a character than a vividly realized archetype, Reinsve didn’t get the message.” In other words, the star infuses this protagonist that could so easily stumble into cliche with a livewire imagination and a massive heart, even when her egocentrism draws our attention back to the potential meanings of the title in all of its self-deprecating Norwegian pride.

To a certain extent, Trier would have us believe that Julie doesn’t know what she wants, but it is more accurate to say that she does know what she wants but can’t for the life of her figure out the way to put that elusive package together. This point of view depends on an embrace of the abstract: thrills, excitement, adoration, attention, and respect are the concepts that would show up on the lists of many no matter what age, although Trier’s world will especially resonate with thirtysomethings.

Sex and romance pinball and ricochet right along with Julie’s capricious career trajectories. The initial seriousness of her commitment to and cohabitation with older cartoonist Aksel (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie, who was also great in “Bergman Island,” another of 2021’s finest) forms the spine of the movie’s examination of intimate relationships, but a chance encounter with barista Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) sets up a triangle that, like many familiar tropes depicted throughout the movie, subtly defies convention. In “Cheating,” one of the most erotically-charged of the chapters, Julie and Eivind test the limits of fidelity without “crossing the line.”

Trier is a gifted storyteller. “The Worst Person in the World” shows off the filmmaker’s command of rhythm and his affinity for the perfectly placed pop song. Cinematic flourishes, including a wonderful sequence of walk-between-the-raindrops-style magical realism, align with soundtrack gems by Todd Rundgren, Cymande, Glamour Hammer, Cobra Man, Harry Nilsson, Chassol, Prins Thomas, Christopher Cross, and others. Art Garfunkel’s “Waters of March” ideally parallels Trier’s feel for micro/macro variations explored in chapters like “Bad Timing,” “Julie’s Narcissistic Circus” and “Everything Comes to an End”:

“A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A knife, a death, the end of the run
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the end of all strain, it’s the joy in your heart”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The first Japanese winners of the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe expand “Drive My Car,” the short story of the same name in Haruki Murakami’s 2014 collection “Men Without Women,” to great success. And although the film lost the Palme d’Or to Julia Ducournau’s “Titane,” director Hamaguchi’s heavy-duty drama has emerged as one of 2021’s most admired features, collecting a sizable number of award season accolades. At 179 minutes, the running time of “Drive My Car” contrasts sharply with the brevity of Jun Ichikawa’s “Tony Takitani,” the 2004 adaptation of another Murakami story that deals with similar themes and shares a major plot point.

A three-hour investment for an introspective movie about a grieving theatre director staging a multilingual production of “Uncle Vanya” sounds difficult to sell to mainstream audiences, but Hamaguchi’s expansiveness is an asset. The filmmaker’s reputation for sprawl has been partly exaggerated: “Asako I & II” and “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” both clock in at two hours apiece. It is 2015’s “Happy Hour,” at 317 minutes, that stretches the bathroom-break limit. “Drive My Car” is fleeting by comparison. For all the viewers who give themselves over to the filmmaker’s meticulous attention to detail and powerful expression of character, the entire movie flies.

Hamaguchi’s set-up/prologue unfolds like a self-contained feature bursting with possibilities (the opening titles don’t arrive until the forty-minute mark). Hidetoshi Nishijima’s Yūsuke Kafuku is a Tokyo-based theatre artist married to a busy screenwriter named Oto (Reika Kirishima). Their collaborative compatibility crackles with an erotic electricity – Oto’s script ideas are devised during the verbal exchanges shared during sex. Hamaguchi carefully seeds surprises that will be revisited much later. Even greater realizations will be made. Many of these will involve troubled young actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), one of the film’s several endlessly fascinating secondary characters.

Two years following the opening section, Kafuku travels to his residency at the Hiroshima Art and Culture Theater in his vivid red Saab 900 (changed from Murakami’s yellow). While behind the wheel, he listens to the recording of Oto reading “Uncle Vanya” dialogue with gaps where Vanya’s lines go; it’s Kafuku’s preferred method for memorization. But following his arrival, there’s a wrinkle. For insurance purposes, his hosts require a professional chauffeur – no exceptions. Following a tryout, Kafuku agrees to the rule. His driver is a young woman named Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura).

As Misaki and Kafuku get to know one another, the unconventional stage interpretation of “Uncle Vanya” weaves throughout the developing action in a kind of parallel story-within-the-story. It’s a tried and true technique that has been used, in one variation or another, for decades: Carne’s “Les Enfants du Paradis,” Ozu’s “Floating Weeds,” Hamaguchi favorite Cassavetes’s “Opening Night,” and of course Malle’s “Vanya on 42nd Street.” Away from the stage, however, the interior of Kafuku’s vehicle plays host to different kinds of drama.

They are surrounded by an incredible ensemble of characters with the capacity to astonish, but the relationship that develops between Kafuku and Misaki fuels Hamaguchi’s examination of how people choose to process long-internalized feelings of guilt and pain. Neither one of these two essential figures is inclined toward verbal expression, but each will divulge information and make striking confessions in moments of earth-shaking emotional energy that expose raw vulnerabilities we’re hardly prepared to witness.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In one of the best scenes of the year, Tilda Swinton’s Jessica Holland sits with audio engineer Hernan Bedoya (Juan Pablo Urrego) behind a massive mixing console in a recording studio in Colombia, working to recreate a mysterious sound that she has been hearing intermittently. Drawing initially from a collection of stock effects, Jessica and Hernan take their time as they methodically narrow down the possibilities, closing in on the particular qualities of the bang that has intruded in Jessica’s life. Shaping and bending the wave with his digital tools until Jessica is satisfied, Hernan is as unhurried as anyone in the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a modern master of the slow and contemplative style of storytelling some would call transcendental.

This exchange in “Memoria” illustrates the filmmaker’s playful sense of humor regarding the artistic enterprise, a kind of winking, behind-the-curtain glimpse at the sausage-grinding process of making sure all the post-production details are just right. The sound Hernan ultimately conjures, for all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from the one that has been following Jessica around, disrupting her sleep and messing with her head. But reading “Memoria” as metanarrative unlocks only one layer of joy – Weerasethakul treats Jessica’s quest with complete respect. The source of the sound is eventually revealed. And with that revelation, the filmmaker just GOES FOR IT.

Both Weerasethakul’s full-length collaboration with Tilda Swinton and the “Memoria” project have been a long time coming. Swinton was to have appeared in “Cemetery of Splendour” (she also contributed to the first English-language book on the filmmaker, published in 2009). Weerasethakul spent time in Colombia in 2017 to develop what would become his first feature shot outside Thailand. The global constitution of “Memoria” may also represent a bid for greater creative freedom; Weerasethakul has for years been frustrated by the censorship imposed in his home country.

“Memoria” entices with its aural preoccupations, but the film is rich with many other ideas and explorations. Admirers of Weerasethakul’s filmography, which includes the brilliant 2010 Palme d’Or winner “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” can bask in the sublimity of Jessica’s episodic encounters. The best of these may be the shift from the urban Bogota to the rural Amazon jungle: Jessica leaves the city only to meet another Hernan Bedoya (Elkin Diaz) whose total recall and superpowered sleeping abilities are as remarkable as his surprise connection to Jessica. Is this second Hernan, rhyming like David Lynch’s “two Chalfonts” or Fred Madison/Pete Dayton, a coincidence, a doppelganger, a mirror?

The film’s official website is as delightfully enigmatic as the experience of watching “Memoria.” It contains a section called “Bang Stories,” a quartet of firsthand accounts of alarming sounds ranging from the comic to the unnerving to the traumatizing. Superfans will also discover the opportunity to purchase a hardcover, companion art book containing “photographs, a personal diary and sketchbook, research notes, treatment excerpts, and email correspondence.” Scouring the website for clues and insights also turns up this absolute catnip: Weerasethakul writes, “I imagine a scenario in which Jessica Holland, a comatose character from Jacques Tourneur’s ‘I Walked with a Zombie,’ wakes up. She finds herself in Bogota, being drawn by a dream or a trauma that she doesn’t remember.” Count me in.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Since his big screen debut in 1996, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a series of rewarding movies as identifiable by their director’s gift for dazzling cinematics as they are by bravura performances and exhilarating ensembles. Anderson has noted that there is nothing quite as exciting as watching a movie star at work, but unknown actors bring an altogether different kind of energy to the mix. In his ninth feature film, “Licorice Pizza,” the filmmaker directs newcomers Alana Haim (of the sister pop/rock trio Haim) and Cooper Hoffman (son of Anderson’s longtime collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman) in an Andersonian mashup that merges San Fernando Valley fact and Hollywood fiction.

The early 1970s time period and location draw favorable comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which takes place four years prior to the events of “Licorice Pizza.” Both movies warp and bend nostalgia-infused fantasy with fancifully augmented depictions of celebrities whose lives intersect with the protagonists. Both movies rejoice in the perfectly placed needle-drops of carefully curated songs emanating from car speakers and transistor radios. Both movies nail the anything-is-possible look and feel of Southern California dreaming.

Hoffman’s Gary Valentine, whose exploits are based in part on the tales of producer Gary Goetzman, is as precocious and entrepreneurial as fellow fifteen-year-old Max Fischer in “Rushmore” (he also brings to mind Tom “The Great Brain” Fitzgerald). Despite the stylistic differences between the imagined worlds of the two Andersons, Valentine and Fischer develop serious crushes on older women, cook up all manner of fake-it-til-you-make-it schemes, see the world not necessarily as it is but how they want it to be, and navigate the liminal state between childhood and adulthood with the support of single parents.

The big difference, however, is that “Licorice Pizza” belongs as much – or more – to Haim’s Alana Kane, the rudderless and restless young woman who captivates Gary when they meet on yearbook picture day at his high school (she’s working as a photographer’s assistant). Anderson recognizes the age-inappropriate obstacle of the potential romance. Much of Alana’s push-pull attraction/repulsion toward Gary revolves around her recognition of their decade gap. But no matter how she tries to leave the teenager’s orbit – in one of the film’s many side trips she volunteers for real life L.A. city council member Joel Wachs’s campaign – she realizes that she has found a kindred spirit.

Their friendship courses through a warmhearted array of offbeat anecdotes that ultimately strengthen their takes-one-to-know-one bond. In one terrific sequence, they deliver and set up a waterbed for hairdresser turned movie mogul (and Barbra Streisand beau) Jon Peters, played by Bradley Cooper in a livewire, scene-stealing turn. In another, Sean Penn materializes as a William Holden surrogate who, not unlike Peters, tests Alana’s receptiveness to his predatory creep game and not-so-veiled come-ons. Penn, gunning a motorcycle near hangout Tail o’ the Cock, lets rip the speed and motion that Gary and Alana demonstrate more regularly on foot. They run with intensity and purpose, racing headlong in the direction of endless possibility.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Master filmmaker Jane Campion, notching a fresh Silver Lion win for Best Direction at the recent Venice Film Festival, returns to the screen after a twelve-year absence with “The Power of the Dog,” a handsome and potent Western based on the 1967 novel of the same title by Thomas Savage. The 67-year-old’s last feature, the lovely John Keats/Fanny Brawne romance “Bright Star,” stands among Campion’s most accomplished movies. “The Power of the Dog” can be added to that list. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another dozen years for the next one.

Benedict Cumberbatch anchors a superb cast as Phil Burbank, a wealthy and well-educated rancher whose close partnership with his brother George (Jesse Plemons) is threatened when George marries widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst). Both Rose and her delicate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) face the nonstop humiliation of Phil’s cruelty and harassment. Campion initially plays up the marked contrast between the siblings, hinting that the successes built by Phil and George could be destroyed by some unspoken turmoil — George is polite and fastidiously groomed while Phil is rude and much in need of soap.

The quotation from Psalm 22:20, “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog” gives the story its title and initializes the possibility that Phil and George may travel the path of Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau. But Campion knows when to hold back information and when to offer revelations that rearrange what we thought we knew about these characters and the things they hide in their hearts. Phil’s unyielding recalcitrance will be tempered with a degree of audience sympathy that brings to mind the danger of the love shared between Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in a narrow space where queerness defies the expectations of heteronormative cowboy life.

Campion investigates the bond between Phil and his late mentor Bronco Henry without flashback. Instead, our own feelings toward the hard protagonist begin to shift once we discover more about Phil through his evolving interactions with Peter. “The Power of the Dog” contains several instances in which major surprises force us to reevaluate things we have witnessed with our own eyes. And Campion, assisted by Jonny Greenwood’s superb score, is brilliant at tightening the screws. Entire scenes unfold without spoken dialogue. Instead, the sounds in the ranch house — boots on stairs, an unwelcome duet between Rose and Phil — are as tense and evocative as any horror movie.

It is surely a disservice to reduce Campion’s filmography to a study in gender, despite the longstanding focus of so much scholarship. In her essay “The Limits of Sexual Emancipation: Feminism and Jane Campion’s Mythology of Love,” Noelle A. Baker asserts in her opening line, “Jane Campion directs movies about strong, eccentric women.” While “The Power of the Dog” makes an argument for the addition of “…and men” to that statement, Dunst’s Rose, indeed strong and eccentric, is another in a long line of richly drawn figures whose interactions with and reactions to all of those in her orbit explode with thrilling complexity and layers of meaning.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

With almost surgical precision, filmmakers Peter Middleton and James Spinney dissect the life and work of “The Real Charlie Chaplin,” a worthwhile addition to the many studies of one of the most recognizable screen performers in cinema history. Their documentary functions partly as critical biography, using Chaplin’s narrative preoccupations as the basis of a psychoanalytical reading of the man’s oeuvre — and vice versa. But the film also moves to scrutinize the auteur’s behind-the-scenes behavior, addressing Chaplin’s sexual predilection for adolescents. Three of the four women he would marry — Mildred Harris, Lita Grey, and Oona O’Neill — were teenagers at the time of their respective unions.

Middleton and Spinney access Chaplin’s incomparable filmography to illustrate their film’s central premise: that Chaplin was so closely identified with the character of the Tramp that we still struggle to separate the creation from the creator. Readers of David Robinson’s essential 1985 volume “Chaplin: His Life and Art” and viewers of Richard Schickel’s 2003 film “Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin” have already witnessed, to a significant degree, the reconciliation of Chaplin and the part he played for so long. Middleton and Spinney decide against the conventional talking head approach favored by Schickel, opting instead for a hit-or-miss series of reenactments (not unlike Clio Barnard’s technique in “The Arbor”) in which actors lip-synch to audio recordings.

Much more consistently engaging is the liberal use of archival material, particularly in the spectacular early sections that contemplate not only the origins of the Little Fellow’s iconic costume but also the way in which that outfit anticipates a personality, encompassing in wordless pantomime all the pluck, tenacity, sexual fluidity, mischief, pathos, fearfulness, and desire to be treated with dignity that would endear our ultimate underdog to millions of viewers. The filmmakers delight in showing clip after clip of Chaplin impersonators practicing the twirl of the cane, the angle of the bowler, and the twitch of the mustache.

Just as it anchors the design perfection of Olly Moss for Criterion’s “The Great Dictator,” that latter item will return later in the film when Middleton and Spinney explore the Tramp’s most unexpected doppelganger: Adolph Hitler. The future tyrant was born just four days after Chaplin, and the similarities in their impoverished backgrounds have enough juice to link the two (see also Brownlow and Kloft’s “The Tramp and the Dictator”). Chaplin’s political consciousness would later lead to an awful cycle of FBI “leaks” — outright fabrications — to Hedda Hopper, who would then publish columns that Hoover would quote to escalate the bureau’s attacks on Chaplin.

The latter portions of the feature are illustrated with the oft-excerpted home movie footage of Chaplin with Oona and children at their Manoir de Ban estate in Switzerland, and they touch on the familiar beats of political exile ahead of the moving acceptance of an honorary Academy Award in 1972. At one point, we hear narrator Pearl Mackie (who is terrific from start to finish) say, “When you ask for the real Charlie Chaplin, a thousand voices reply.” No doubt each new generation will reexamine and reassess the offscreen Chaplin even as the monumental achievement expressed through his body of work will continue to seduce freshly-stunned viewers.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmaker Penny Lane follows her thought-provoking examination of the Satanic Temple with a subject many would anoint as the Devil of Smooth Jazz: Kenneth Gorelick, known to millions of record buyers as Kenny G. Far from a straightforward biographical profile, Lane embraces G’s decades-long divisiveness to elaborate on questions of taste, appropriation, and genre. And the musician’s participation in the documentary only adds to the film’s status as a must-see. Lane gets to have her cake and eat it — G is comfortable with the endless supply of jokes made at his expense, a condition that gives Lane the space to examine the highs and lows of a peculiar cultural figure.

With “Listening to Kenny G,” Lane affirms her status as one of the most talented nonfiction storytellers working today. Her films may not yet approach the dazzling, next-level craft displayed by masters like Errol Morris and Kirsten Johnson, but if she keeps producing movies like her latest, it won’t be long before she ends up on the short list of greats. Lane combines bottomless curiosity with an impish sense of playfulness that reads to some observers as a mean streak. And yes, there are moments in “Listening to Kenny G” when Lane lets her subject fumble like a poseur unworthy of his association with the word jazz.

The director enlists a murderer’s row of jazz scholars, academics, and journalists to deconstruct the complexities and problematics of Kenny G. Ben Ratliff of “The New York Times” puts his finger on that most quintessential of Kenny G associations when he notes that G’s music brings to mind the act of waiting — in a dentist’s office, a bank, a lobby, an elevator, etc. Columbia University’s Chris Washburne, NYU’s Jason King, and Will Layman of “PopMatters” join Ratliff and a few others to explain so much visceral critical revulsion in the face of widespread popularity.

Lane alternates between her time spent with Kenny G and the talking heads wielding their scalpels. She also sketches the trajectory of G’s unprecedented career ascendancy, covering early videos, the Johnny Carson appearance when “Songbird” took off, G’s golf game (another aspect of his extracurriculars that naysayers love to skewer), and the unofficial status of “Going Home” as an end-of-day fixture played in food courts and train stations across China since 1989. Most of this stuff projects Wonder Bread innocuousness, but Lane plows headlong into the much deeper controversy of G’s “duet” with Louis Armstrong.

To this end, the prosecutors take turns articulating G’s ignorance of jazz tradition and its improvisational give-and-take musical conversations between and among players. Jason King notes, “He seems to draw from this rich and venerated history of Black music without necessarily contributing much back to the form. He’s such a deeply problematic figure because he really extends this long and troubling history of appropriation in popular music.” Some of Lane’s interviewees read aloud from Pat Metheny’s poison-pen comments on the “What a Wonderful World” recording.

Through it all, Kenny G radiates a Zen-like calm, deflecting even the most caustic insults. So what if he fails to identify Thelonious Monk in a portrait of greats allegedly responsible for inspiring G’s own “New Standards” album? Who cares if he claims, “I don’t know if I love music that much” in conversation with Lane? Kenny G, who says he still practices three hours a day, every day, knows that he can’t be all things to all people. Lane also knows it, as her terrific movie attests.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Had a home video copy made its way into his eclectic collection, one cannot help but wonder how Ingmar Bergman might have rated Mia Hansen-Løve’s utterly delightful “Bergman Island.” The French director’s first English-language movie is a bold and satisfying metanarrative that uses the legendary Swedish auteur as the starting point for a dreamy consideration of life, art, romance, loss, regret, and the many challenges of the creative process. Setting the action on Bergman’s hallowed turf turns out to be far more playful and far less austere than one might first guess. Hansen-Løve never takes herself too seriously, lining up a parade of references from “Persona” to “Cries and Whispers” with more disarming humor than ponderous melodrama.

The Fårö setting provides the filmmaker with a treasure chest of opportunities to indulge and explore cinephilia, reflexivity, homage, and intertext, but the potential autobiographical interpretations are equally enticing. The broadest strokes of the director’s previous relationship with Olivier Assayas mirror the fictional marriage between Vicky Krieps’s Chris and Tim Roth’s Tony. Participating in a residency program that lodges the couple in the bedroom where “Scenes from a Marriage” was filmed (just one of Hansen-Løve’s sly jokes), Tony and Chris interact with Bergman admirers and scholars ahead of a retrospective screening of one of Tony’s films.

Hansen-Løve makes clear to the viewer that Chris, a screen performer branching out behind the camera, feels overshadowed by her more celebrated husband. Whether by chance or by choice, the casting of Krieps resonates. Her Hollywood breakthrough as haute couture dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock’s muse Alma Elson in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” resides at the heart of another story concerned with artistic practice and the shifting dynamics of women finding power while entangled with professionally accomplished and “difficult” men.

As Chris’s restlessness and her increasing distance from Tony hint at deeper conflict hidden just below the surface of their partnership, Hansen-Løve launches the movie into orbit with “The White Dress,” the story-within-the-story that Chris narrates to a distracted Tony, hoping in vain that he might offer valuable, constructive feedback and make suggestions for an ending. In her screenplay, Chris imagines Mia Wasikowska as protagonist Amy, whose own desire to reconnect with old flame Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie) while attending a wedding on Fårö triples — and arguably quadruples — Hansen-Løve’s self-portraiture.

The new “Bergman Island,” which shares its title with the 2006 documentary by Marie Nyreröd, isn’t shy in its critiques of the gifted moviemaker. Chris, who refuses to fawn over the man despite demonstrating enough knowledge of his career to keep pace with Tony and the other superfans, wonders aloud whether Bergman sacrificed being a good parent (nine children!) for his art. The frozen-in-time preservation of Bergman’s properties allows his spirit to live on in the pilgrims drawn to Fårö. Several of the famous filmmakers in Jane Magnusson and Hynek Pallas’s “Trespassing Bergman,” another documentary that takes a voyeur’s tour of Bergman’s personal rooms, do their best to account for his fixation on the spiritual and the erotic. Mia Hansen-Løve now joins their ranks.