The quintessential, mid-century art film: enigmatic, provocative, European, and shot in black and white. Expanding on the surreal dream sequences of 1957’s Wild Strawberries, writer-director Ingmar Bergman opens Persona with a nightmarish montage consisting of images of film reels, a slaughtered lamb, an impaled hand, and a silhouette of a young boy holding his hand up before the blurry, projected image of a woman’s face. From there, the movie settles into a fairly basic narrative, in which a chatty nurse (Bibi Andersson) cares for an actress (Liv Ullmann) who has mysteriously gone mute. The pair convalesce at a remote seaside cottage, where their identities begin to merge in eerie ways. A few of Bergman’s films flirt with horror (I think especially of Cries and Whispers, which shares some of Persona’s thematic concerns, as well as his next feature, Hour of the Wolf), but Persona feels fully rooted in the genre. What begins as an idyllic experience of female sanctuary slowly transforms into something more unsettling. At first their relationship takes a spooky, sexual turn (one of the movie’s iconic images is of Ullmann standing behind Andersson as both face the camera, brushing her hair back to reveal her face). Eventually, however, it moves toward actual violence, self-inflicted and otherwise. Add the clinking, plinking score by Lars Johan Werle and Sven Nykvist’s cinematography—which captures stark blacks and whites and every shade and shadow in between—and you have a clear exercise in psychological horror. In terms of performance, Ullmann and Andersson are somewhat restricted to prescribed channels—Ullmann’s actress remaining stoic throughout; Andersson’s nurse on a set path toward hysterics—but they offer nuance within those guardrails. (We’re told Ullmann’s actress has “hard eyes,” but notice the moments, especially during an early scene in which she listens to music, that they soften.) If, in the end, both women register as metaphors more than distinct individuals, that’s because Persona mostly amounts to a movie of ideas—about performance, identity, and the very burden of existence. As I said, the quintessential, mid-century art film.
(3/1/2023)
