Persona

Persona; art-film / drama, Sweden, 1966; D: Ingmar Bergman, S: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Margaretha Krook

The lights turn on, a film reel starts turning, a camera starts projecting on the screen in a cinema. A blond boy touches a giant face screened on the wall. Actress Elisabeth becomes mute in the middle of the play "Electra". From that day on she never speaks a word, but the doctors can't determine any kind of psychological or physiological sickness. Nurse Alma accompanies Elisabeth to an isolated house near the sea, hoping she will recover. Since she is always silent, Alma speaks more and more instead of her, even mentioning an affair with an unknown guy and aborting the baby. Alma later finds Elisabeth's letter: there Elisabeth writes how she is studying her and is amused. Alma confronts her and has a fight with her, and while threatening to grab a bowl of boiling water, Elisabeth shouts: "No, don't do it!" After Elisabeth lies down in a hospital bed, Alma leaves in a bus.

Shining art-film "Persona" has such a surreal exposition that the viewers at first don't know what they are looking at: two light bulbs turn on, a movie reel starts turning, a camera is projecting a scene of an animated film backwards, a spider walks over a white surface, a man is removing the womb of a sheep, a boy is touching a giant picture out of focus of a woman on the wall—who turns out to be Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann), implying that her son is longing for her love. After that psychedelic opening, the real story starts, in which the main heroine, actress Elisabeth, all of a sudden becomes mute and thus never speaks, while her nurse Alma (amazing Bibi Andersson) on the other hand constantly speaks all the more instead and begs her to say something. Their relationship is full of symbols, or how Ingmar Bergman said "undefinable secrets of life" (for instance, religious symbols: a religious person is constantly praying God for an answer, or psychological: Alma and Elisabeth are one and the same person, or medical: the transference of the patient and the doctor), full of hypnotic, unusual, huge closeups of faces and experimental style. It even has such daring moments as the one where Alma recounts her unexpected sexual encounter with a guy: "He grabbed my breast, it hurt so bad... I felt it like never before in my life, the way he sprayed it into me." This goes to imply that Alma is a symbol for eros and vitality, while Elisabeth stands for thanatos and death.

The whole film is a giant subconscious psychoanalysis, a cinematic Rorschach test where the viewers themselves have to think and decipher what it all means. Bergman also makes a few errors and certainly resorts to artistic bluffing here and there, but for a movie where only one character talks in monologues, he has a remarkably smooth pacing. Several surreal images are mysterious. For instance, in one, Elisabeth observes in shock a TV report of monk Thích Quảng Đức setting himself on fire in Saigon as a protest against persecution of Buddhists; in another, she later stares at a World War II photo of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. None of these have anything to do with the story, except that they show true rebels against the system in this world—as opposed to Elisabeth, who is trapped in apathy and passivity, and cannot even conjure up the courage to rebel. Elisabeth stopped talking while playing a role on stage, and later Alma confronts her that she wanted to play the role of a mother, but then gave up and rejected her newborn son. Elisabeth simply abandoned playing a role she didn't want to in this world, because she didn't feel these roles anymore. She abandoned life, because it is meaningless, and in her last scene it is implied she died. Alma, on the other hand, continues playing her role and lives, regardless. Elisabeth is Alma who gave up, as much as Alma is Elisabeth that kept going in life. At 75 minutes into the film, the two faces of these women "morph" into one, concluding the film's theme. Life is both sadness and happiness; despair and hope—and one must find a way to live with both of these extremes. It can either be an existence where Alma is Elisabeth's mask, or Elisabeth is Alma's mask. "Persona" is full of scenes that infiltrate in the viewers memory (the scene where Alma looks through the window while the movie reel suddenly literally bursts), one of the best achievements Bergman ever made.

Grade:+++