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Persona Blu-ray Review
Cinema that defies or challenges convention; cinema that experiments boldly with purpose and poetry; with performance and possibility, can be moving and deeply affecting. Persona is a fine example of such cinema. Director Ingmar Bergman’s creation is acerbic and bittersweet, told with striking dialogue and flashes of visual brilliance. But Persona has been as chided as it was cheered, inviting a number of critics (then and through the years) to offer a collective yawn at the style and substance of Bergman’s filmic design.Critical bemusement at Bergman’s anointing as cinematic genius often center on his affinity with the theater. These critical assaults tend to fail in understand the myriad expressions of cinema possible, and of Bergman’s ability to challenge in the cinematic medium; to explore with great sensitivity not only the dramatically rich subjects but the medium with which he is exploring and sharing them.
Studio: Criterion
Distributed By: N/A
Video Resolution and Encode: 1080P/AVC
Aspect Ratio: 1.40:1
Audio: Other
Subtitles: English
Rating: Not Rated
Run Time: 1 Hr. 23 Min.
Package Includes: Blu-ray
Folding book inside sleeveDisc Type: BD50 (dual layer)
Region: A
Release Date: 03/25/2014
MSRP: $39.95
The Production Rating: 5/5
“You could be me just like that...though your soul would be too big…”
Persona opens with an avant-garde display of flashing images and of a young boy, unable to sleep, rising from his bed before approaching what we soon realize is the cinematic realm, immediately challenging the audience to follow as we transition between the realms. Here, Alma (Bibi Andersson), a nurse, tends to Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), a stage actress who for an unknown reasons is unable (or unwilling) to speak. To aid in her care, the hospital administrator offers her a cottage by the sea to rest and recovery. There the nurse Alma and Elisabet seep away the days, as Alma fills the silence of her voiceless patient’s presence with endless stories of herself and her life. She reveals secrets of her past; sensual stories of abandon, and regrets that weigh heavily on her behind her daily smiles and friendly conversation. And Elisabet still does not speak. Before their arrival at the peaceful cottage, Elisabet had paced her hospital room, unable to sleep, with the television lighting up the sterile walls with horrific images of war protesters self-immolating. The images stunned and terrified Elisabet as she paced her hospital room. The horrors of what she saw pushed her further into silence. But why did she not speak to begin with. An image of what we are told is Elizabet’s son causes anguish there too. But we are not given an answer. After some time at the cottage, Alma grows impatient, longing for there to be a word, even a single word, uttered by her patient. Then, a letter written by Elisabet that Alma discovers casts a shadow on who Elisabet is, and why she is there. It is a trigger of significance and the end of what was.Director Ingmar Bergman, having been rapt with Pneumonia and then struck by debilitating bouts of “giddiness” as he described it, found his plans of making a film called The Cannibals sidelined, and, having watched nurses during a turn at the hospital examining each other’s hands, was inspired to the substances of Persona. A dark sided tale concerned outwardly with the psychology of two women who form the tumultuous dramatic center of the story. And by establishing a different relationship that the audience should have with his particular tale (and perhaps asking the audience to consider the relationship they have with all images), Bergman’s Persona offers a fascinating experiment in expressing the immutable relationship movie goers have with the images flashing across a projected screen. What lies in the ether between our lives and the lives flickering in that other world? It’s a marvelous thought to have been explored so boldly.Directorially, Bergman affords a spare mise en scène to distinguish key moments – harkening to the simplicity of the stage – but not as a failure to transfer this peculiar and prevailing narrative to cinema, but rather as an element of breaking down the wall between cinema and reality. Bergman’s embrace of narrative discordance only serves to rapt us with mystification that demands we try to understand, interpret.What each of us takes away from watching Persona is part of the grand achievement of film. Dissected and analyzed since its release in 1966, there are myriad perspectives on what Bergman sought to convey. The boy at the beginning (and end) of the film can be interpreted to be the son kept away from the love of his mother by the trap (or better, the lure) of the cinematic arts. He is both the core and the outsider to the lives of the two women whom we watch scratch away at their own facades. The two lives, each with a piece that the other cannot have (an ability to erase motherhood, or the ability to become a mother after an abortion), seem to duel onscreen with madness of passion.The intimacy that forms between Alma and Elisabet; between nurse and patient, is so intense and personal at times that fundamentally we must consider that these are one and the same person. Two sides of the same personality. They are at least two possible outcomes of lives who could have been the same but for circumstance and decisions which molded them be quite different. Director Bergman plays with our perceptions of these two women, framing shots of Alma and Elisabet as one (consider the shot of Alma talking at the table, the camera moves in and what we see is Elizabet’s arm framed behind Alma’s head talking – two bodies uncomfortably merged to be one).It also seems that we are offered a deconstruction of the images we project. The person we are and the person we show. Through lives of desperation, regret, abandon, and shame. Moments of insecurity, cruelty, coldness, warmth and indifference, we appear to be asked something of ourselves and our world. Supported by performances that transcend the screen, with Bibi Andersson’s Alma psychologically disintegrating with conviction, and Liv Ullmann’s Elizabet conveying reams with her silent expression. With only the briefest exception these two actresses drive every scene and are extraordinary.Persona, then, offers powerful themes, but remains a film that invites the audience’s perception and interpretation of intent.
Video Rating: 5/5 3D Rating: NA
Audio Rating: 4.5/5
Special Features Rating: 4.5/5
Overall Rating: 5/5
Reviewed By: Neil Middlemiss
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