Per­sona (1966)

Watch­ing Ing­mar Bergman’s Per­sona offers a strange and unique expe­ri­ence. It’s a film you stag­ger away from and, most prob­a­bly, into a lengthy peri­od of pri­vate con­tem­pla­tion. In that snap sec­ond when your eyes are still adjust­ing to the house lights, you’ll feel com­pelled to land on a snap judge­ment, but you’d do well to try and stymie your synaps­es for a just lit­tle while.

Go for a walk on a desert­ed beach. Maybe even take some time away on a small, bucol­ic island to process what you’ve just seen. Lay on the peb­ble beach and leaf through the lit­er­a­ture which con­tains all the the­o­ries and read­ings, none of which are con­clu­sive. And once you come to the end of it all, realise that you’re maybe more dumb­found­ed than at the point when you only had your own thoughts to con­tend with.

Per­sona gives the impres­sion of being an art­work, one that looms large in a spare, white-walled gallery space, one that you can pace around and peruse from all angles. Yet no amount of star­ing and rumi­nat­ing can get you any clos­er to lock­ing its deep­est mys­ter­ies. Almost as if that’s the point of its exis­tence. It’s a cir­cuitous trea­sure hunt that leads to an emp­ty chest.

At its sim­plest, Per­sona is often described as as a body-swap film. It appears as if its two prin­ci­ples – Bibi Andersson’s Sis­ter Alma and Liv Ullmann’s Elis­a­bet – merge into a sin­gle form, and then sep­a­rate back out with frac­tured iden­ti­ties. At one point Bergman uses a merged split-screen shot in which the per­fect halves of the actors’ faces con­join to cre­ate a sin­gle, ter­ri­fy­ing vis­age. Alma is a nurse charged with coax­ing Elis­a­bet, a not­ed stage actor, from a peri­od of anx­i­ety-dri­ven cata­to­nia. Ull­mann acts entire­ly with her eyes and lips, while Ander­s­son is giv­en free roam­ing when it comes to mono­logues and unchecked self expression.

Though a ten­der, pos­si­bly even roman­tic, bond devel­ops between the two women, things turn sour when Alma starts to believe that Elis­a­bet is refus­ing to com­mu­ni­cate so that she will open up fur­ther and reveal more of her secrets. Alma’s con­fes­sions play like the type of deep-dive emo­tion­al exca­va­tions reserved for the psychiatrist’s couch, but along with this pre­cious per­son­al infor­ma­tion comes a wealth of trust and affec­tion. She begins to believe that she has become a dis­pos­able muse for Elis­a­bet who is leach­ing off her dis­en­chant­ment so as to enhance her own career and her knowl­edge of the frag­ile human psyche.

Lat­er in his career Bergman made a film called Autumn Sonata in which a bit­ter feud between a moth­er and daugh­ter plays out. But where that film offers a con­ven­tion­al appro­pri­a­tion of real­i­ty (and is none the worse for it), this film employs var­i­ous sub­tle tricks to keep it at a remove from real­i­ty. The fram­ing of the actors, and the way in which they’re blocked in front of the cam­era, cre­ates a dis­tanc­ing effect. When Ander­s­son intones her lines, it’s dif­fi­cult to deter­mine whether she’s unlock­ing a stream of inner con­scious­ness, or care­ful­ly craft­ing and inflect­ing her lines as the direc­tor would want her to.

It’s always made to feel like a film, yet that’s exact­ly what makes its sug­ges­tive insights so pen­e­trat­ing. These very real issues about iden­ti­ty, moth­er­hood, sex­u­al­i­ty, jeal­ousy, and an almost vam­pir­ic urge to draw the essence from oth­ers believed to be social bet­ters all rise up from the stark, expres­sion­is­tic images. The world feels syn­thet­ic but the fig­ures feel whol­ly gen­uine. The idea of dual­i­ty of mean­ing is enhanced fur­ther through Sven Nykvist’s elec­tri­fy­ing high con­trast cin­e­matog­ra­phy, with whites that scorch you pupils and blacks that descend into the abyss of infinity.

Though most peo­ple will have their favourite Bergman, this one must sure­ly be con­sid­ered his crow­ing achieve­ment. It’s a film which earns its sta­tus as an enig­ma by cre­at­ing a com­pelling shell around the mad, hid­den core. Sur­re­al exper­i­men­ta­tion which sup­press­es easy answers is rarely this enter­tain­ing, and the lan­guage of cin­e­ma has sel­dom been used in such out­landish man­ner before or since.