Persona
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Movie Reviews of Persona
Movie Review: Excellent, Weird
Summary: 4 Stars
I can see why this movie is a classic. I chose to watch it because I found it on a list of some of the world's top movies. I can't say that I was disappointed, though I did find the story weird, and sometimes, to be honest, I couldn't figure out what was going on. But still, the psychological depth of the movie kept me riveted, and kept me wondering what was going to happen. And even if I was lost and confused at times, the tension remained so great throughout that I kept watching.
A few weaknesses, though, got under my skin.
Although the film was psychologically deep, I didn't feel the character of the actress totally added up, and I think the director intended this. But personally this troubled me. She was portrayed as both sane and insane at the same time in a way that I (as a therapist who worked with many people labeled with psychosis) didn't find believable.
The other thing that got to me was the sexual perversity. I felt it was a bit overdone -- and unnecessary. But again, maybe that's just my personal thing. Maybe it really was intrinsic to the movie.
Movie Review: A modernist masterpiece...
Summary: 4 Stars
In the early '60s, Bergman's visual and narrative style became ever more austere in focusing on tormented souls seeking guidance and comfort from an empty heaven, thus paving the way for a stark foray into extreme close-up in the enigmatic "Persona."
A modernist masterpiece, the film initiated an introspective trilogy about the ivory towers built by artists as a defense against the horror of existence... It was Bergman's first completely innovative work, acknowledging itself as artifice through the regular insertion of non-narrative images such as projectors burning, film breaking, fragment of silent movies...
"Persona" depicts the vampiric relationship between a talkative nurse and an actress who refuses to speak or work after a traumatic realization of the futility of creation in a loveless world surrounded by war... Psychology, philosophy and social comment are mixed to brilliant effect in a complex, clear interrogation both of filmic illusion and of the illusory values of modern life...
Movie Review: Brilliant movie
Summary: 4 Stars
This movie is truly magnificent. The visuals here are truly something else. I wouldn't be too sure about what sort of interpretation I should give because the movie is very open ended and hence you are left to make your own take on what this is about. Some will like it, some will not. I found it a very gripping story of sorts. There is a story to it but the thing becomes fractured midway through and from then on you have to make your own way through this movie. It does question the impact of friendships and the deceit and betrayal that can come from them. It's all very real in a sense and then it's not. It is that which questions our own take on reality. In a way I suppose it is a very existential movie. Though by no means should you take my word for granted. See the movie for yourself, take from the film what you can ( if there's anything there for you ).Movie Review: Five stars for visionary artistry; one star for the message
Summary: 3 Stars
There is little doubt that Ingmar Bergman's cinematic masterpieces have continually redefined the popular notion of film as art, and Persona takes that influence to the extreme. As the film began, with flickering, disintegrating film reels, a phallus, an eviscerated sheep, and a boy lying limp in a morgue, Persona challenged everything I knew about cinema and left me asking two questions: "Is this art?" and "Is there a purpose?" The answer to both is certainly "yes," though I am not as pleased with the purpose as with the art.
While the film is, on the surface, the story of electively mute actress Elisabet Vogler and her nurse, Alma ("soul" in Spanish), I choose to see it as a film about two sides of the same person -- two internal voices squabbling over the mess of a complicated life full of dark secrets hidden in shadowy recesses. Additionally, motherhood is an issue raised repeatedly and prominently in the film. Alma still carries the shame of a secret abortion (as well as the pregnancy's genesis) while Elisabet secretly hates her son and wishes he were dead because she is not able to requite his love. It is hard to resist connecting this to the image which frames this film of a young boy yearningly touching a (movie?) screen projecting the intermixing faces of Elisabet and Alma. I choose then to see Bergman as the dichotomous Alma/Elisabet mother, the audience as the yearning children that he alternately rejects (Elisabet) and makes love to (Alma), and film (or perhaps this film) as the insufficient love he attempts to give to his children (and we are reminded by Bergman throughout the film that Persona is a paltry cinematic illusion, not a substantial reality).
I write all of this partially to give new viewers to the film a point of reference against which to contrast their own interpretation of this amorphous work, and I also write this to make it clear that I appreciate the artistry and symbolism behind this film even while I do not appreciate the film, itself.
Here's my issue: I believe that the purpose of art is to connect while instructing. A great film should win your affection (emotionally and/or intellectually) while subtly changing you in the process. This film challenges, and good art should challenge, but it offers me little more than that. Elisabet and Alma, as the only two fully developed persona in the film's reality (of course, they are one persona and it isn't reality), function as everywomen -- norms in the world as Bergman sees it. While Elisabet's elective silence is abnormal, the internal cause behind it is presented as quite the opposite. Even the doctor, a minor character at the beginning of the film, confesses that she understands the underlying issues that haunt Elisabet. She feels them too.
Yet both Alma and Elisabet are monstrous, and I find myself unable and unwilling to connect with them. I don't want to believe that all mothers secretly wish their babies were dead or that all faithful fiances are secretly having wild beach orgies with adolescents while their partners are away. We all hide ugliness within ourselves, but this is more ugliness than I am willing to handle. I am not often bothered by shocking art. Even the sheep having its eye gouged and its intestines ripped out at the beginning didn't disturb me in the slightest, but this misanthropic view of humanity haunts me. Bergman attempts to show us that, beneath the facade, we are all monsters, and then reminds us that he too is a monster hiding behind his art.
It is hard to accept that Persona is a product of the same artist who brought us films like "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries" which, while asking all the hardest existential questions and challenging our senses of self and purpose in life, ultimately provided opportunities for redemption. There were lessons to be learned, changes that we were inspired to make. Maybe longing for such things sounds contrived and conventional; maybe I sound like the guy who is turned off anytime he doesn't get a happy ending, but all I see beneath Persona's art is the message that we are all truly terrible people deep down inside. I am not able to connect to the protagonists emotionally nor intellectually because of this, and I do not see anything redemptive nor positively transformative about such a conclusion. It leaves its audience on the morgue table, naked and emotionally starved, desperately reaching out to the coldness of the movie screen for a sense of hope that Bergman is either unable or unwilling to give. Ultimately, Persona offers its viewers a lesson in depravity and misanthropy, and nothing more.
Movie Review: The Nurse Becomes the Patient
Summary: 3 Stars
My third Bergman film thanks to the greatest cable channel ever invented - TCM, is a like a cream puff. The inside tastes much better than some of the other parts. There is a great story here, unfortunately buried inside a bunch of artsy-fartsy film junk that almost spoils it all.
A very normal female nurse is asked to take care of an actress who has decided to stop speaking. Since it is determined that the actress seems perfectly fine to the doctors, the head doctor suggests that the nurse spend some time with her at her summer house at the beach. This sets up a very interesting situation in which two people will be spending time together, but only one of them can talk.
As the situation unfolds, the nurse begins to expose more and more about herself to the actress. It then begins to resemble a sort of therapy session for the nurse as she digs deeper and deeper into her own life.
The movie reached it's climax - pun intended, when she decribes an orgy-like experience she and a girlfriend of hers had at the beach with two boys. A sidenote for you men who are reading this - if you do not get "excited" during this purely verbal scene, then there is something wrong with you.
The movie then proceeded into some type of 1960s LSD trip where I did not know what was real and what was a dream for the nurse. I hate when directors do that in a movie because it causes me to struggle as opposed to enjoying the movie and actually getting something out of it. It was especially upsetting to me with this movie because the main concept was so interesting.
This is not Bergman's worst movie, but it's nowhere close to being as good as The Seventh Seal.