Persona Mini Poster
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Genre: Drama

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Writing Credits: Ingmar Bergman (Story and Screenplay)

Spoiler Alert:  In reviewing this film some significant parts of the plot are discussed.

Persona, Bergman said, "is about one person who talks and one who doesn't, and they compare hands and get all mingled in one another".  The two people in question are actress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ulmann) and her nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson).

Elisabeth is on the stage acting as Elektra, when suddenly in the middle of the play she stops speaking, remains silent for a minute, then a grimace appears on her face.  From then on she shuts herself off in absolute silence.  The actress is admitted to a psychiatric hospital where a friend of hers works as a consultant (Margaretha Krook).  "Do you think I don't understand?", says the doctor to Elisabeth, "...the chasm between what you are to others and to yourself... Every tone of  voice a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace...  You can be immobile, you can fall silent.  Then at least you don't lie...  I admire you.  I think you must maintain this role until it's played out, until it's no longer interesting...".

Elisabeth is assigned to Sister Alma and the doctor suggests that the two women move to her seaside house for a relaxing holiday.

Alma is a simple soul.  She chose to become a nurse because her own mother was a nurse, and she always felt too lazy to change herself - she confesses to Elisabeth when they start to become intimate.  Alma is not sure she will be able to cope with her patient, because she knows that Elisabeth is not ill, but just made the choice of closing up - a choice that only somebody who is mentally very strong can make.

The two women seem to get along together while staying by the sea.  Alma tells Elisabeth a lot about herself, and Elisabeth listens with interest and attention.  They sunbathe during the day and eat and have a few drinks till late at night.  Until the nurse reads a letter that Elisabeth wrote to her husband, in which she tells him how amusing it is to study simple minded Alma.  This is the turning point in the story - its Alma's epiphany.  She starts seeing herself and Elisabeth with different eyes.  In a burst of rage she shouts at the other women "I know how rotten you are!".  But at the same time, Alma is mad at herself because she realises how blind and shallow she's been until now.

In a dream sequence, Alma enters Elisabeth's bedroom and finds her unconscious.  She's frightened, glancing shyly at Elisabeth, when suddenly Elisabeth wakes up and they exchange personalities.  Alma experiences the condition of the other woman's soul.  It's like in a mirror scene.

The definitive exchange of personalities happens in the final monologue.  Elisabeth is holding a picture of her son in her hand, and Alma appears deeply changed - her hair combed like Elisabeth's and she even talks with a different voice.  At the end of Alma's soliloquy the two halves of the women's faces are put together, giving shape to a new single image: a new 'persona' is born.

Once back at the hospital, nurse Alma visits Elisabeth in her room and after a brief, almost motherly speech, forces her to say the word "Nothing".  The other woman painfully says it: "Nothing...Nothing...".  These are the last words in the film.

The end scene refers back to the opening sequence where we see a projector and a film running.  Cuts of silent movies - images of nails driving into Christ's hands, dirty snow.  A child (Jörgen Lindström) lying on a bed is watching it, and then he gets up and tries to touch a big blurred woman's face projected on the wall and in the finale, he tries to reach her again.

To review Persona was an initiation trial I decided to undergo because I said to myself that if I am able to talk with some clarity about a film whose main subject is silence, perhaps that means I could talk about anything - even about nothing.  But of course the problem is that I don't know if I've passed the test, because in a case like this we can judge ourselves just through other people's eyes.

The most intriguing thing about Persona is that its language, images and messages are crystalline, but at the same time they have so many layers, so many facets.  They can be interpreted at just a subjective level, because they have been constructed to speak directly to each single viewer - to each single 'persona'.

Reviewed by Claudia Sandroni, Premier Movie Reviews 2006

Bergman said that he started writing Persona when he was in hospital with double pneumonia and acute penicillin poisoning, after he had spent a few hard years trying to rescue a theatre in an advanced state of disintegration.  While he was taking notes for the screenplay, he asked himself why did he care so much about the theatre, why was he doing it?.  Was the role of theatre finished?  He felt that what he was doing was meaningless, that his own life was just a play to cover up emptiness and boredom.  And that there was only one way to avoid desperation: "To be silent.  And to search behind the silence for clarity".

Elektra is one of the most important myths in Greek mythology.  Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles wrote tragedies centred on Elektra's character.  She is the personification of grief, of a desperation so acute that goes beyond human endurance.  Indeed, in Aeschylus' Choephoroe (458 BC), her sorrow is wanted by the gods.  In Sophocles' Elektra (418 - 410 BC), instead, the central theme is her psyche, her human condition, the lament of a woman who shut herself in her immense sorrow.

Alma in Latin means soul.

Bibi Andersson

Liv Ulmann

Margaretha Krook

Gunner Björnstrand

Jörgen Lindström

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