Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

 

When I was younger I was obsessed with Bergman's movies. Whenever there was a screening of a Bergman's movie in the theater I would run without a second thought. I have seen numerous of his many films in the theater and I thought back then that his cinema is the closer you get to psychoanalysis. Although I'm quite different person than the one I was in my twenties, I still believe that Bergman's movies have something that makes them special inside the arthouse family. Persona is one of his most famous, most celebrated and definitely his most experimental work. Trying to fully understand and explain Persona is like trying to put a linear explanation to David Lynch's Lost Highway. It won't fucking happen. Persona is mostly what you feel while watching the movie and much less what you clearly and logically understand. If you don't let yourself loose with that movie so your emotional sophistication take over, you'll be wasting your time watching it.

Persona is the story of a famous actress who suddenly stopped speaking and a young nurse who is trying to take care of her. After some point the difference between the two women is blurred. Who is who is highly indistinguishable. And that is practically the whole premise of the movie. The rest, the heart of the movie, relies heavily on the abstract and many times emotionally highly edgy dialogue and the actual filming of the movie which is an example of clear and untamable modernism. Persona is a movie that is best that you watch as you observe a painting or a performance. It's highly eccentric agenda makes the screening a special procedure that you must first forget the conventional things that you know about a movie. There is, though, a clear and powerful charm coming from the screen straight at you and if you have the slightest sensitivity for art you'll certainly get. Because Persona can be found in the details, there is no question about that. There is at one moment a split frame of the two faces of the main characters which in the frame become as one. That's definitely the way that the movie chooses to communicate with you, meaning through the cinematic language and not through clear, verbally coherent things. With all the crap that we are watching every year and all that trashing of pure art that we are witnessing, Persona stands as an example of fearless creativity in a world that pushes violently people to become so obvious that all the magic of art is completely lost. And that I think is the greatest quality of that movie. Its uncompromising character.