Persona

“Your hiding place isn’t watertight enough, life oozes in from all sides.” I’m not sure what I’ve been waiting for, but I’ve avoided Bergman’s movies up until now. I figured, why not murder my mind and make Persona my intro to his work. Should I be intimidated? Should I be doing this movie as my first Bergman movie? The world may never know. Well, maybe I’ll know in like an hour and a half. I think Persona is a movie about a huge amount of the phenomena that people experience around one another. The magic of talking, just imagine that someone is similar to you in most ways and won’t reply to you or seemingly judge you. Imagine the outlet that is. Imagine the things you’d let slip out of your mouth that you never pictured saying to another human being. Imagine then the power and the influence any sort of communication from them would hold, the rarity of their written word let alone their spoken word. Imagine, just imagine the flaming heat of pain and anger knowing that this new receptacle of your most personal anecdotes, who you’re fully aware is mentally competent and intelligent even, has found you to be hypocritical and rash in their effort to “study” you. Imagine the regret you’d have after realizing that you weren’t speaking to a dog, this was a human being. Just one that has made it their rehabilitation to speak not, and to absorb instead of project. From there, I think the point of Persona is to build your own interpretation of how that plays out. Are Alma and Elisabet the same person? Maybe. Are they separate and greatly impacting each other? Maybe. Is Elisabet really just a conduit for Alma to come back to Earth? Maybe. Is none of this even real, is this something imagined by one or the other? Who knows, and I love a movie that lets your imagination run wild. I think that’s a sign that the movie respects its audience and believes that it’s smart enough to come up with a perceptually intuitive meaning for what they saw. I appreciate Persona as a story. Persona absolutely MUST be one hell of an influence for Robert Egger’s movie The Lighthouse, and I can’t blame him. As much as I wanted to call this movie pretentious and film school fodder before watching it, I can’t do that while still telling the truth. Bergman really did do some special stuff with Persona. Let me go no further without putting forward the fact that Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann put on the two best female performances I’ve ever seen at the same time. They needed one another to live up to the task when one is asked to be so outward and the other is asked to be so inward, and they simply bounce off each other in every way. That dynamic is only aided by Bergman’s ability to film faces, which is paralleled only by Chris Nolan for me so far. You want to know what the expression of someone going through the level of psychological break that both of these characters are enduring looks like, and you get it head-on. All the framing and the tracking shots are a bunch of fun to watch as well, really Persona is a pleasure to look at overall. I can’t imagine this movie in color either. I’m on board the Bergman train now, I completely get it. I was sure, and I mean sure, that I would end up dismissing his work as “not for me”, and if the rest of his career is like this then I couldn’t have been more wrong. I like to be challenged and I think Ingmar will have no issue obliging me. I badly want to own this film now. There’s a Criterion that I’ll grab the next time I see it, and this has put the fucking ginormous Bergman box set on my radar for the future. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries are films I’ll be promptly checking out now if I had to guess. What an interesting film. Also, what the fuck was the beginning of the movie.