Impenetrable and dull
Added 7/31/2009
The Bottom Line:
Persona feels more like a pet project of Bergman's than a film meant for mass consumption: it's consistently obtuse, mostly dull, and feels long even at under 90 minutes; unless you're a real Bergman aficionado then stay away from this very unpleasant film.
2.5/4
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Five stars for visionary artistry; one star for the message
Added 6/17/2009
There is little doubt that Ingmar Bergman's cinematic masterpieces have continually redefined the popular notion of film as art, and Persona takes that influence to the extreme. As the film began, with flickering, disintegrating film reels, a phallus, an eviscerated sheep, and a boy lying limp in a morgue, Persona challenged everything I knew about cinema and left me asking two questions: "Is this art?" and "Is there a purpose?" The answer to both is certainly "yes," though I am not as pleased with the purpose as with the art.
While the film is, on the surface, the story of electively mute actress Elisabet Vogler and her nurse, Alma ("soul" in Spanish), I choose to see it as a film about two sides of the same person -- two internal voices squabbling over the mess of a complicated life full of dark secrets hidden in shadowy recesses. Additionally, motherhood is an issue raised repeatedly and prominently in the film. Alma still carries the shame of a secret abortion (as well as the pregnancy's genesis) while Elisabet secretly hates her son and wishes he were dead because she is not able to requite his love. It is hard to resist connecting this to the image which frames this film of a young boy yearningly touching a (movie?) screen projecting the intermixing faces of Elisabet and Alma. I choose then to see Bergman as the dichotomous Alma/Elisabet mother, the audience as the yearning children that he alternately rejects (Elisabet) and makes love to (Alma), and film (or perhaps this film) as the insufficient love he attempts to give to his children (and we are reminded by Bergman throughout the film that Persona is a paltry cinematic illusion, not a substantial reality).
I write all of this partially to give new viewers to the film a point of reference against which to contrast their own interpretation of this amorphous work, and I also write this to make it clear that I appreciate the artistry and symbolism behind this film even while I do not appreciate the film, itself.
Here's my issue: I believe that the purpose of art is to connect while instructing. A great film should win your affection (emotionally and/or intellectually) while subtly changing you in the process. This film challenges, and good art should challenge, but it offers me little more than that. Elisabet and Alma, as the only two fully developed persona in the film's reality (of course, they are one persona and it isn't reality), function as everywomen -- norms in the world as Bergman sees it. While Elisabet's elective silence is abnormal, the internal cause behind it is presented as quite the opposite. Even the doctor, a minor character at the beginning of the film, confesses that she understands the underlying issues that haunt Elisabet. She feels them too.
Yet both Alma and Elisabet are monstrous, and I find myself unable and unwilling to connect with them. I don't want to believe that all mothers secretly wish their babies were dead or that all faithful fiances are secretly having wild beach orgies with adolescents while their partners are away. We all hide ugliness within ourselves, but this is more ugliness than I am willing to handle. I am not often bothered by shocking art. Even the sheep having its eye gouged and its intestines ripped out at the beginning didn't disturb me in the slightest, but this misanthropic view of humanity haunts me. Bergman attempts to show us that, beneath the facade, we are all monsters, and then reminds us that he too is a monster hiding behind his art.
It is hard to accept that Persona is a product of the same artist who brought us films like "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries" which, while asking all the hardest existential questions and challenging our senses of self and purpose in life, ultimately provided opportunities for redemption. There were lessons to be learned, changes that we were inspired to make. Maybe longing for such things sounds contrived and conventional; maybe I sound like the guy who is turned off anytime he doesn't get a happy ending, but all I see beneath Persona's art is the message that we are all truly terrible people deep down inside. I am not able to connect to the protagonists emotionally nor intellectually because of this, and I do not see anything redemptive nor positively transformative about such a conclusion. It leaves its audience on the morgue table, naked and emotionally starved, desperately reaching out to the coldness of the movie screen for a sense of hope that Bergman is either unable or unwilling to give. Ultimately, Persona offers its viewers a lesson in depravity and misanthropy, and nothing more.
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The Nurse Becomes the Patient
Added 6/9/2009
My third Bergman film thanks to the greatest cable channel ever invented - TCM, is a like a cream puff. The inside tastes much better than some of the other parts. There is a great story here, unfortunately buried inside a bunch of artsy-fartsy film junk that almost spoils it all.
A very normal female nurse is asked to take care of an actress who has decided to stop speaking. Since it is determined that the actress seems perfectly fine to the doctors, the head doctor suggests that the nurse spend some time with her at her summer house at the beach. This sets up a very interesting situation in which two people will be spending time together, but only one of them can talk.
As the situation unfolds, the nurse begins to expose more and more about herself to the actress. It then begins to resemble a sort of therapy session for the nurse as she digs deeper and deeper into her own life.
The movie reached it's climax - pun intended, when she decribes an orgy-like experience she and a girlfriend of hers had at the beach with two boys. A sidenote for you men who are reading this - if you do not get "excited" during this purely verbal scene, then there is something wrong with you.
The movie then proceeded into some type of 1960s LSD trip where I did not know what was real and what was a dream for the nurse. I hate when directors do that in a movie because it causes me to struggle as opposed to enjoying the movie and actually getting something out of it. It was especially upsetting to me with this movie because the main concept was so interesting.
This is not Bergman's worst movie, but it's nowhere close to being as good as The Seventh Seal.
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SMOKE AND MIRRORS; A SWEDISH MIND GAME
Added 3/25/2009
Often I've read people describe Bergman as essentially a crazy, unpleasant old man living in isolation on a remote island. Haven't you? Imagine: People visit him there, at their peril, it seems, for one has the impression that he lived as a kind of diffident hermit spider who survived on the psychic juice he squeezed out of his victims, which stress-derived juice he transmuted into the visions and insights that became, eventually, his neurasthenic screenplays. Seems plausible enough. And here, viewing-reading PERSONA, this cinematic ESSAY ON DEPRESSION projected as a relapse into apathy by a famous actress -- reading it backwards and forwards and looking at it from many angles -- as one should with most abstract art, one can fairly well make out how and out of what material he contrived this movie.
It is a period piece, remember, arising out of that era of Cold War anxiety and Existential nausea -- late 50s - mid 70s -- when nothing seemed either solid or valuable. It was a time when Psychoanalysis and Shrinks (like Sybils) of different stripes were thought weighty both as symbols and characters in stories (LADY IN THE DARK, EQUS, SPELLBOUND, ON A CLEAR DAY) about the struggles of individuals with and protests against society. And so Bergman, who was notorious for his psychic instability -- in common with other european auteurs like Almodovar, Passolini and Fassbinder -- dredged the muckbins of his unconscious memories, for themes and incidents he could use. And, he cannibalized material from others of his friends and colleagues. And he stole for effect when it s uited him; the most obvious example of it being the insertion in the screenplay of the most famous footage from the Viet Nam War, that of the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, burning for a seeming eternity in the middle of a Saigon street. Horror (and outrage) by association. Which is to say, without cost. Or personal involvement.
We can reconstruct it this way: Probably at some point Bergman has a mini-breakdown; a fit of apathy like a dry patch of inspiration. Screenwriter's Block. He goes to a sympathetic and well-to-do Therapist who is sensitive to his position as ornament of Swedish Theatre and Film, and recommends a stay at his summer, beachfront home. (The location proves fortuitous for it is close where in future, Bergman will build a home for himself. There, later, several other of his meditations on mental illness will be written, and some will be filmed.)
Whether it actually true or not, through creative visualization, Bergman switches genders and envisions a situation where the silent, near catatonic patient (based on himself) and her care-taker will assume "roles." (Re-examine Genet's THE MAIDS.) The roles they assume in the film are that of the patient and Psychiatrist. (Not Male/Female but Dominant/Passive.) In typical Freudian theory and practice, the patient transfers his/her concerns on to the Therapist who remains not quite silent, but both distant and non-assertive.
This is very likely a situation familiar to Bergman who was himself cold and distant and non-communicative, often. And it known that as a womanizer, and charming, he often chose women who were younger and more open, or more suceptible to his crafty form of control and manipulation. (The Sadie/Mazie waltz.)
In PERSONA, the central confession of the Care-giver/now Patient, is of an intimate, sexual nature. (Again here, there is a touch of alcohol as the barrier-breaking medium of self-revelation. [AUTUMN SONATA.] Which makes me think Bergman probably liked to drink, and got some of his material from his drinking partners.) Unique in the film's writing, it has the character of an overheard or pilfered confession or recollection from some woman, and here, is used to provoke within the ambiguity of the mis-en-scene, a feeling of sexual ambiguity -- call it a lesbian tweak -- that allows Nyquist to suggest with his camera all kinds innuendos, visually, silently, without degenerating into smut, and this to such a degree that the screen has the look of a Fashion Magazine spread of the period with shots composed in the manner of the fashionable fashion photographers of the day; Penn, Avadon, etc. In this respect PERSONA is like a hard cover cocktail table book of Blonde-on-Blonde Lesbian Pornography, with the softest conceivable core, and the devine Liv Ulman as the eternal center spread.
Whether or not you think any of these musings even remotely plausible, you are likely to enjoy the film if you are attracted to abstract art, generally, and are entertained by the ambiguities of films of the period like Renais' LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, or Antonioni's L'AVENTURA. From the very first credits, both artsy, eccentric and disturbing, and that angular irritable music undernearth them, meaning: CAUTION, Montage (or pastiche) ahead, to the initial shot of Ulman heavily painted and in costume playing in a Greek Tragedy and having her fit of Stage Fright or spasm of psychic paralysis, you will know that you're in for a bumpy ride and may expect to be dragged with all deliberate speed over one of the cold beaches of polished rocks off the Swedish holiday coast. It's a very interesting ride on any number of levels.
When you think of its comparatively brief duration, of PERSONA's tiny cast, and of its black and white format, you may be prompted to realize, with astonishment, how tiny the production budget must have been, and to realize with dawning respect and amazement, with what economy of word and image Bergman and his cinematographer, Nyquist, managed to construct such a towering hour and a half of fascination. Like all movies, it's all smoke and mirrors, of course, a shadow play, but their effective articulation is a question of masterful dexterity. And in PERSONA, the display of the director's Skill in manipulating his ensemble is the star of the show.
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"You'll Always Will Have Your Laughter"
Added 3/7/2009
Just finish watching "Persona" from my Ingmar Bergman box set and I must tell you that (after watching "Through a Glass Darkly", "Winter Light", and "The Silence") this was the greatest movie that he ever did. So much that it's one of the five greatest classic movies (pre-1970) I ever saw in my life (other four are "Bullitt", "Lawrence of Arabia", "North By Northwest", and "Casablanca"). Great performances from Bibi Andersson (who looks like the British actress of that time-Susannah York) and Liv Ullmann (who would start a relationship with the director after he divorced from his wife; even though it lead to nothing despite having a child) as Alma-the nurse who helps troubled young actress Elisabeth Vogler (Ullmann); who has hit a wall when she walks out of rehearsal of the play 'Electra' and refuses to speak. We also get a walk-on role from Ingmar's favorie actor Gunnmar Bjornstord as Elisabeth's husband.
But the real star is the cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who was Bergman's D.O.P. since "The Virgin Spring") and "Persona" has to be one of the ten greatest shot films of all time. Just look at the black-and-white and the shadows on the interiors and on the lead actresses' faces: He did an accomplishment that not even all the movies of the film noir genre could create. While the sequence in which Bergman films the same scene twice through the ladies' perspective (instead of cutting back and forth) is astonding.
There are two scenes that stand out: One is the long dialogue that Andersson gives to Ullmann in which she tells her a story about how she was suntanning naked on a beach with her lady friend when two teenage boys came up. As the camera focuses in on Andersson and Ullmann, Alma explains that it lead to sex between them and that caused her to come home with her husband and have sex again to get pregnant; which she did but she had to have an abortion and was told never to have a child again. I'm telling you that was the first time in a long while that I got an erection from a movie just by dialogue; especially when Alma tells Elisabeth in detail about the foreplay ("He grabbed my breast"), feeling the boy's penis inside her vagina, and experiencing an orgasm. She even said 'Shooting his sperm' at one point!
The other moment comes when Alma fights with Elisabeth over why she will not talk (I liked that scene before it when Ullmann is sitting on a table wearing a big hat while Andersson is against the wall wearing black glasses and although you don't see eyes, you can tell from her lips that Alma is really pissed off; which leads to her walking up the rock field and throws the glasses off her face and on the ground as if to say 'My gloves are off!'). It leads to Alma getting her nose bloody and in the film's defining moment, after she poked her left cheek, Elisabeth grabs her hand on it and gives a evil smile at her. That gave me chills considering that if they ever do a film montage on the movies in the 1960's that moment would be in there right next to Ernest Borgnine's character Dutch giving an evil smile of his own in "The Wild Bunch" (see my review of that movie).
Then there's Ullmann's performance. It is a shock as to why the Academy people did not nominate her for Best Supporting Actress considering that they nominated Vivien Merchant for "Alfie" even though she is in for only one scene while Ullmann is seen for basically the entire film of "Persona"...and she only speaks THREE TIMES! How can't that be Oscar worthy? Truth be told, I think she should of won it anyway because it's more stronger than the real winner-Sandy Dennis for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" In all, it's a great movie. Leonard Martin in his book said that "Persona" is a movie for people that are feeling blue. And he is correct because this is one of the reasons why 1966 was the best year film had in the 60's. Or as what Andersson said to Ullmann as an example, "I'm not Elisabeth Vogler. You're Elisabeth Vogler."
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