Sweden, 1966
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
With Liv Ullman (Elisabeth Vogler), Bibi Andersson (Alma), Margaretha Krook (the doctor), Gunnar Björnstrand (Mr. Vogler)
The doctor is confident: Elisabeth Vogler is in good health, physically and mentally. Nothing is wrong with her. Yet she is mute; she has lost the ability – or the willingness – to speak after experiencing a sudden and inexplicable shock onstage as she played Electra. For Elisabeth Vogler is a leading actress; her silence puts on hold a great career. She is also a married woman and the mother of a boy, but neither the husband nor the son can meet her at the hospital where she is, wreaking havoc on a fine family life. So, what can be done?
The doctor decides that a young, cheerful, dedicated nurse named Alma is going to look after this peculiar patient who is not really sick, sending them to her seaside house, hoping that a change of air and life would break Elisabeth’s stubborn silence. Alma performs her task with an engaging and sympathetic manner that slowly drifts into a chummy, overfamiliar behavior which does not change Elisabeth’s mood at all but exposes what her own soul feels. A letter sent by the actress to the doctor, read by chance, causes the nurse to tackle her case in a completely different, and ruthless, way. The cozy relationship gives way to a permanent battle of wills, the gentle Alma getting as nasty and unbending as the distant Elisabeth, until they call it quits and leave the doctor’s house.
The plot can safely be summed up this way but the narration brings the audience from the very start into a more complex, tenser, deeper vision of the soul. An upsetting and stunning hotchpotch of eloquent but barely intelligible pictures opens the film, a sequence that also assert in the most physical and clearest way the fragile nature of cinema, with the flash of light that starts a projector or a strip of film suddenly burning – how inflammable this art actually is – and the equally brittle nature of the human beings and their relations, with this odd series of shots on people lying on a table, with just a thin white sheet over them, including a young, skinny teenager who cannot sleep or read and tries unsuccessfully to reach a distant, out of focus picture, a portrait of Elisabeth. This extraordinary explosion of riveting but confusing visual oddities, which even includes early cinema sketches, comes back later in the film, signaling a turning point as both women acknowledge they are enemies. The end of their story is ingeniously, and simply, marked by the projector’s light getting turned off, as now everything is consumed. The turmoil racking the minds and upsetting the rules of cinema is over.
Shot in a beautiful black and white cinematography, which can be cuttingly sharp or tenderly soft or geometrically appealing, depending on the moment, the film puts the characters in a remarkably bare environment during the first part, engaging with theatrics to raise the tension and underline the contrast between the characters. Alma tries to grasp what her new assignment implies while Elisabeth shuts herself in her silence, a behavior her the doctor analyses rightly in the harshest and frankest terms. Once the so-called patient and her assigned nurse arrive to the seaside, the narration becomes more fluid and the sets are cozier but then it slowly comes apart and the film relentlessly picks up the dour and confrontational take of the start. These clashes lead to a dramatic use of the close-ups as the protagonists’ faces get ceaselessly and intensely scrutinized and turn into a battlefield where are reflected both the strongest personal feelings and the ambiguous beauty of women (the director once said about faces: “Everything is there”).
The visual architecture of “Persona”, build upon a simple and puzzling plot, shelters a discomforting and shocking interrogation on the nature of personality. Alma’s sympathy is sucked by Elisabeth’s silent attention and the professional relationship they should entertain becomes a bizarre symbiosis as they share the same clothes, the same cigarettes, even though Alma was not a smoker at the start, and the same attitudes. They get so close that a more troubling and ambiguous relation seems in the offing, until words (but not pictures) cast another light on Elisabeth’s intent. Feeling betrayed, Alma chooses to change her attitude but she just ends up playing her antagonist’s game, which leads to the most memorable sequence, when Alma decides to think like Elisabeth and to tell her what her bond with her son really is – the camera is searingly focused on the malaise creeping over Elisabeth’s face and then on the confident look of Alma as the monologue is repeated and the event is actually shot a second time. The relation between those women has morphed into a mesmerizing game aiming at shaping, seducing, or silencing a person.
Elisabeth’s attitude defies expectations and rationalization. If the doctor is sure she just plays a role to protect herself, the camera captures her at one point being sincerely struck and horrified by news from the ongoing Vietnam War and later willingly tearing a picture of her son. Even the fateful letter does begin with her description of happiness as she feels better and is not entirely disrespectful of Alma. Yet she does force Alma to make an awkward confession and, in an odd episode, to talk and spend time with Mr. Vogler, a blind man who does not realize what is going on. Elisabeth’s face can display an ambiguity that is riveting as well as distressing. She is a mystery to us and probably even to herself. The film would never tell what sense to give to it; it just records it and the impact on Alma who becomes herself a riddle – where did she find the strength and the resources to be so callous and perceptive? Is evil so ingrained and quick to spring in a person that even one Alma can be so terrible? Troubling questions on individual integrity and the thin line between truth and deception, in our relationships with the others and with ourselves, are raised in a form bound to stupefy and haunt our minds, especially as seeking clarity matter less to the director than acknowledging how opaque people are, and perhaps need to be, and anyway would always, at least in part, remain to our eyes.
Actress Liv Ullmann pulls it off as a performer consciously choosing not to perform and nevertheless performing her person while her partner Bibi Anderson brings a heartbreaking freshness to a woman drifting to shores that have been barely imaginable to her till she got that decisive assignment. This being an Ingmar Bergman movie, the director’s life adds another layer to the film’s comprehension. Andersson has been working with him for more than a decade and would make new, different, moves in her career, while Ullman has just caught his attention, with “Persona” starting a long and fruitful collaboration. His inspiration has been clearly looking for fresh perspectives and in this film, whose score is a definitely a genuine and compelling product of the avant-garde, as amazing as the images director of photography Sven Nykvist crafted, Bergman seems to open the doors of people’s secret lives with an authority and a talent that break not only his usual ways of shooting, the ways cinema can capture the human soul, and our own way of watching.