Review of Persona (2000) by Amie U — 30 Dec 2009

There are so many tricks, gimmicks, plot twists and smoke & mirror setups you can use to confuse and disorientate an audience. The only problem is plot twists are almost always designed purely for the audience in mind, not to enhance the story. So after you've seen the film, watched it again, "figured it out" and realised there's no real intellectual meaning behind the chopped up narrative, you might as well fahgeddabout it. When you reduce cinema to a Sudoku puzzle, there's a severe lack of replay value. Ingmar Bergman's confusingly straightforward film "Persona" is quite vague, but not so vague that it is unfocused and doesn't say anything at all, it is vague so that different people will understand it in different ways.

Starting off with a short clipshow featuring a spider, a vampire, a crude silent cartoon, a penis, a nail being driven into a hand among other things, Actress Elisabeth Vogler falls silent while performing a play, is checked into a hospital where nurse Alma is ordered to take care of her, Alma's superior recommends they check into her summer home by the beach. As time passes by, Elisabeth stays silent, while Alma constantly talks about herself (including one incident involving an orgy on the beach, Bergman's refusal to go into flashback, instead letting Alma's words do all the describing makes it even more powerful). Things turn sour when Alma intercepts a letter Elisabeth wrote for someone else, revealing how she enjoys studying Alma while remaining silent, causing Alma to intentionally leave a piece of glass on the floor for Elisabeth to step on, which makes Alma give her such a fierce look that a hole is burned in the middle of the picture (at the midway point of the film), another mini clipshow is viewed (focusing on the veins in the eyeball) and the film switches as both women experience a switch of personalities before the memorable image of the two women's faces morphed together. The ending is ambiguous to say the least.

Even if the psychological aspects of the film don't interest you, you can simply marvel at the beauty of the black & white cinematography, Sven Nykvist makes a drab hospital room look like a work of art, the rest of the film isn't bad to look at either. The atonal soundtrack at the beginning really sets the tone for a disorientating experience, and what can you say about the performances? Liv Ullmann is superb, her expressive face conveying so much with so little, no wonder Bergman had an affair with her, but I've always thought that Bibi Andersson gave the slightly better performance that always gets overlooked, but that's nitpicking because they're both incredible. The real master of the film is Bergman's direction, which leaves plenty of room for discussion on what it all means, and the screenplay could be one of the best ever written, for it simply gives you so many pieces of a puzzle to think over and digest that you could ask a million different people their interpretations of it and get a million different answers.

I'm too tired to fully discuss my thoughts on this film, but by looking over the various other reviews for it, it's mind boggling at how much thought and depth you can fit into a film that's only 80 minutes long. I'll never fully understand what the film is "about", but that's the reason why I love it so much.