PERSONA

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

   

PITCH: In real life Ingmar Bergman lies in a hospital bed dying but the imagination of this court jester of Swedish anxiety/depression has an idea for a movie about an actress suffering a breakdown and the nurse in charge of her as the actress recuperates at an isolated, island cottage. Then comes the weird moment of communion in which the two women physically merge into one.

  

STORY: The actress—played by Liv Ullman—freezes up in the middle of a theatrical performance of Electra, thereafter refusing to speak. We aren’t told why, but from the context it’s fair to guess that she withdraws because she feels inadequate in the face of the horrors of the modern world as she watches humanity (the nurse, Bibi Andersson, chattering on about her troubled sex life) revel in its petty woes.  

 

HOOK: Bibi Andersson had been Bergman’s mistress, now Liv Ullman was assuming that role. The plot of the movie makes no sense in itself. Movie critics have been arguing over its meaning for nearly 50 years. But as a symbolic representation of Bergman’s evolving relationship with the two women, it is as sharp and clear as a writer’s image in a mirror. What we in the audience are seeing is not the characters played by Bibi and Liv but the artist’s projection of his own feelings onto them.

  

JOHN: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” Freud said, but sometimes a movie is not just a movie, a novel is not just a novel, and, yes Spanky, a bone is not just a bone. This movie stopped me in my tracks 40 years ago and has all the same power today. The film deals definitively with two favorite Bergman themes: 1) the difficulty of true communication between human beings, and 2) the essentially egocentric nature of art. Bibi Andersson later stated about the nurse in “Dialogue on Film,” an article in American Film magazine (1977): “She had never used her imagination toward other people; she had never analyzed what was happening to herself either. Suddenly, through the silence of the other woman, she was able to put herself in her place, understanding her world and her thinking and to express that.”  Bergman has made her an artist, and we, in the audience become one as well. Critics may argue over Persona’s meaning, but it will change your life.

 

  GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)

  

SPANKY: There’s one great passage: the nurse talks about a day and night of sex on a beach, and as she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her voice and the emptiness of her present life in her face, you begin to hold their breath in fear that the director won’t be able to sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. But he does. It’s one of most erotic sequences in movie history.

 

 TWO PAWS UP” (4 BARKs out of four)

  

KEEPER: Bergman—whose death last year was pretty much ignored at the Academy Awards—says of this film: “Persona saved my life. This is no exaggeration.”