Persona (1966)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Film Review

Perhaps the most significant thing about Persona, Ingmar Bergman's most profound, self-consciously artistic and disturbing film, is that the director regarded it as one of his most important works.   It's a fascinating piece of cinematic art in which Bergman explores two of the themes which interested him most - psychoanalysis and existentialism.  The deceptively simple narrative construction barely conceals a labyrinthine study of the human psyche, that complex web of neuroses and primal urges that governs so much of our conscious lives, like the unseen hand of a mischievous puppeteer.

The central idea of the film appears to be the psychoanalytical notion of transference - the idea that one individual can assume the personality of another through some intense trauma or psychological flaw.  It is a concept which features a great deal in thrillers (including many of Alfred Hitchcock's films), where the hero (usually an investigating law enforcer) ends up adopting the character traits of the villain he is pursuing.   Persona treats the subject more directly and makes the process of transference more explicit, because it focuses entirely on the two characters involved.

The film concerns two women - an actress and a nurse - who are physically almost identical, and one of whom (significantly the actress) has lost the ability to communicate.  Alma, the nurse, appears to be a well-adjusted, thoroughly respectable young woman with an idyllic future mapped out before her.  Yet, as the story unfolds, it soon becomes apparent that her normality is merely a surface illusion.  Beneath her calm veneer we begin to see something much darker, much more passionate and dangerous.  Elisabeth, the silent actress, is her alter ego, perhaps her true nature, the part of her that will not speak.

One plausible interpretation of the film is that only one of the women exists physically - the other is a projection.  What we are seeing are not two separate women, but two aspects of the same woman who is experiencing a harrowing mental collapse.  Perhaps Alma is a figment of Elisabeth's imagination, the pure uncorrupted soul she secretly yearns to be. Or may be it's the other way round - perhaps Elisabeth is how Alma now sees herself, prompted by guilty recollection of her past sins. This theory is borne out by the scene where Alma is mistaken for Elisabeth by the latter's husband, and later when the faces of the two women are superimposed.  The film ends once Alma/Elisabeth has resolved the issue of her own identity and can return to the world, a whole woman once more.

From a stylistic and technical point of view, Persona is arguably Bergman's greatest cinematic achievement.  There are not many film directors who manage to use black and white photography so effectively, so imaginatively, and with such immense poetry.   From the opening pre-title sequence (a bewildering montage of seemingly unrelated images of a supposedly Freudian nature) the spectator is drawn into Bergman's dark exploration of the subconscious, seduced by the film's stark iconic imagery and the expressive power of the mesmeric performances of the lead actors, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann.  Persona is a unique work that doesn't just invite a multiple viewing but rather seems to demand it of you, such is the enigmatic power of its haunting expressionist cinematography and the sense that it contains within it some fundamental truths about the human condition.  It is unquestionably a masterpiece, and most probably one of the greatest films of all time.

Film Synopsis

Whilst performing a stage play, a well-known actress Elisabeth Vogler loses the power of speech.  There follows a mental breakdown throughout which she is bed-ridden and unable, or unwilling, to speak.  Her doctor sends her to a house by the sea, to be cared for by a young nurse, Alma.  The latter becomes fascinated by her silent patient and reveals intimate secrets about her own past.  Elisabeth's unbroken silence soon perturbs Alma's calm, and the nurse undergoes a strange inner transformation...