Considering how much I liked both Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, I was really looking forward to watching Persona. It is apparently considered to be Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made. My wife says she has watched this many times already but was willing to watch it again with me. In the event, I can’t say that I like it very much. On an intellectual level, I have to admire how brilliant it is, but it’s just not a film that speaks to me.
Right from the start, a bewildering succession of seemingly unconnected images assaults the viewer, including famously a still image of an erect penis. It’s clear that Persona isn’t what you would call an approachable film. The two women who are central to the story are Elisabet Vogler, a famous stage actress who has suddenly become mute in the middle of a performance, and Alma, a nurse who has been assigned to care for her at a seaside retreat. Since Elisabet will not speak, Alma fills in the empty spaces with her own voice, beginning with empty trivialities and ending with the most intimate secrets from her own life.
More than anything else, Persona seems to me to be an exercise in pure minimalism. Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson as the two women are the only real performers. The rooms that they occupy are stark and barely decorated at all. Most shots are close-ups of faces. With so little in play, how then can a director convey the maximum of emotion and meaning? One way is to use dialogue to paint pictures in our mind’s eye. Alma’s monologue of a chance erotic encounter with under-aged boys is apparently one of the most famous scenes in this film. As Robert Ebert noted, the storytelling evokes so vivid a scene that many viewers report being able to remember watching it even though of course nothing of it is actually shown.
The other is that by offering powerful and tantalizing images without grounding them in any clear context, the director forces the viewer to desperately grasp for any shred of meaning possible. There is a plethora of interpretations of what this film means, with each critic or academic convinced that he or she has some unique insight into it. Of course, it’s possible that the film could support multiple overlapping themes all at the same time, and personally I’m fond of the theory that Alma, who has a weaker personality, seems to be subsuming into Elisabet more dominant character. But ultimately, I believe that this is a film that is about the power of cinematic imagery itself, as revealed when the camera pulls back near the end to reveal the crew who are filming the women. This also, I think, explains why so many other directors have picked this one of the favorite ever films.
As I’ve written in my post for The Double Life of Véronique, I prefer more concrete themes than this and I only have so much patience for films that are about cinema itself. That’s why as brilliant and as complex as Persona is, it’s just not a film that I find myself liking very much.