Persona Persona MGM DVD 1966 / B&W / 1:33 slightly overmatted full frame / 85 min. / Persona / 24.98 Starring Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Björnstrand Cinematography Sven Nykvist Production Designer Bibi Lindström Editor Ulla Ryghe Original Music Lars Johan Werle Written and Directed by Ingmar Bergman
	Also available in The Ingmar Bergman Special Edition DVD Collection Boxed set (112.96, street date April 20, 2004), with Hour of the Wolf, Shame, The Passion of Anna and The Serpent's Egg. Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Persona is perhaps Ingmar Bergman's most abstract picture. It's his most focused work in a filmography that favored minimalist psychological expression. It's also plainly his most "arty," a stack of visual conceits and gimmicks that rarely allow a narrative to play without the director intruding, almost visibly pulling the strings. It wasn't the King of the Headscratchers (that was Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad) or the ultimate in alienation (Antonioni, L'Avventura) but it beats both those titles for distilled Swedish navel-gazing. With the hynotically interesting Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson on board, Persona definitely holds one's interest. Of the show's 83 minutes, 50 must be of held closeups of the two Nordic actresses. Synopsis: Actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullman) undergoes a mental rebellion. She's lucid and composed but refuses to acknowledge people, respond to their questions or speak. Her doctor (Margaretha Krook) doesn't think the actress belongs in a hospital and dispatches her along with private nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) to the doctor's own beach house for a period of recuperation. Once alone, Alma does all the talking. She opens up to the beautiful, silent woman and a process of personality assimilation begins. Dreams become confused with reality, emotions get out of hand and Alma begins to think her charge is robbing her of her identity. In 2004 terms Persona looks exactly how a European Art film is supposed to look. There are cuts to extraneous visuals of obscure meaning. There are even flash cuts to disturbing content.  1 The show opens and closes with the symbolic and self-referential visual of a projector's carbon arc firing up; various filmic subjects -- a naughty cartoon, a Mélies-like fright show -- unspool as if reality were awakening by undergoing a Philip K. Dickian film evolution. A number of stylized two-shots during the course of the show have been imitated ad infinitum by perfume and fashion ads - you'll recognize them when you see them. They're very arresting but have lost some of their shock value. The hospital is blank walls and empty rooms of the kind that would drive sane people mad. The doctor's beach house is a similar structure that becomes similarly nightmarish during Alma's dreams: Elisabet glides in from a grossly overlit room, "integrating" as she walks out of the harsh glare. We're invited to stare for quite a long while at Ullman's reclining face as darkness falls around her. Alma and Elisabet closely resemble one other in basic facial physiognomy, and soon it seems that the silent Elisabet is a Pod, studying the human whose body she will soon be snatching. Alma is a knot of frustrated sexual desires and can't help relating to Elisabet through sensual dreams. Elisabet smiles knowingly and allows Alma to keep talking. It's an idyllic existence, an artificially unlikely situation that Bergman has confected to play his visual games. If I thought my doctor would send me to his beach house, I'd stop talking too! Empathizing with someone, caring for and identifying with them can be an unhealthy combination, and Alma is soon getting too close (even the non-dream interplay is unprofessionally intimate) and talking too much. Alma recites a pornographic incident she and a girlfriend had with two teenaged boys on a beach,  2 a confession that Elisabet casually exploits. Alma loses her detachment and her nursely control of the situation. At this point the story sort of breaks down into a Bergman experiment. His films of this period focus on psychological deterioration, a theme expressed in blunt cinematic terms. One soliloquoy lasting several minutes is repeated verbatim by running two camera closeups one after another - first the listener, then the speaker. The gambit isn't as revealing or riveting as the experts claim. Alma apparently dreams that Elisabet's husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) arrives, but in the dream she has become Elisabet, and kisses him passionately while the real Elisabet stares blankly in mannered compositions. Horror fans will react immediately when one woman cuts her arm, and the other immediately starts kissing and sucking the blood. Elisabet is behaving like nothing less than a vampire and the blood analogy is direct, if a little too obvious. Bergman would never stoop to make a commercial trifle like a real genre picture, one that could posit its personal meanings and musings only indirectly. The most visually arresting moment is when Bergman superimposes the two women's faces next to each other, half & half. The match is so good, it looks like one of them - no, the other - no, some strange kind of morphed third entity. Yet it comes off as the kind of gimmick we'd expect from Weegee. Alma finally gets her patient to speak just one word, that, true to Bergman's M.O., reeks of studied pessimism and bleakness. Nothing much is settled; the show ends because the director's bag of tricks runs out. Persona has power because Bergman employs two of the most powerful faces in movies; we can't help but feel involved in Ullman and Andersson's problems even if we don't understand them. He trots out some atrocious footage of a Vietnamese monk immolating himself to horrify Elisabet. Is the pressure of a cruel and oppressive world the cause of her rebellion of silence? She also studies that famous, terrible photograph from WW2 where a group of Jewish refugees stands on a sidewalk and one lone child raises his hands in confused, terrorized surrender. The communal guilt of the crimes of the horrid human race is also too much for Elisabet. All of these intellectual themes seem like bad cinema compared to the honest believability of Bergman's actresses. The movie can claim a rare dimension of emotional intimacy that's not to be found anywhere else, not even in Bergman films. MGM's DVD of Persona is one not affected by the recall that spoiled the February release of their boxed set, which will now debut in April with Hour of the Wolf and Shame remastered from different transfers. Those two were incorrectly put out with 1:66 mattes, when they were officially meant to be 1:33.  3 Persona hasn't been recalled even though the transfer has been overcropped somewhat (not much), the effect of which one can see by viewing the trailer included on the disc ... which shows more around the periphery of the images. (It's also matted to at least 1:85!) MGM already had flat transfers at the ready to correct the other two, but waiting to retransfer the entire film of Persona wasn't in the cards. So this is how it's going to be ... my monitor overscans so much that until heads are chopped off, I've stopped becoming concerned about such things. Unfortunately, all the well-intentioned Web outrage will probably result in MGM steering clear of further High-Art special editions. The image quality is great and it's nice to be able to remove the subtitles to enjoy some of the classier camera moves on these two blonde ladies without the distraction of words popping on and off the screen. The extras are good. Ingmar Bergman biographer Marc Gervais may know Bergman inside and out, but when he's on camera he can't seem to speak a coherent sentence about the Swedish master. He's almost embarrassing in the short docu, A Poem in Images. On the other hand, Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Andersson are spectacular, giving us the full lowdown on the show in lucid detail. Ullmann openly admits she didn't understand Bergman's story in the slightest, which was okay by her. Andersson is a wise beauty, sagely observing that the beautiful young woman in the film is mostly a different person than the one she is today. But she remains proud of her youthful self on screen. Both ladies have separate interview featurettes. Ullmann's is a complete rundown on her affair with Bergman and how it broke up both of their marriages when they decided they had to continue their lives together. Pretty Confidential stuff. There's the trailer I mentioned, some photos and an English track for those who can't bear to hear foreign dialogue. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Persona rates: Movie: Excellent Video: Excellent, but slightly misframed Sound: Excellent Supplements: 2nd English audio track, Commentary by Bergman biographer Marc Gervais, A Poem in Images featurette, Interviews with Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, Photo gallery, trailer Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: March 13, 2004 Footnotes: 1. Even an erect penis in the odd opening sequence. It's only a few frames long, but to modern eyes used to watching modern movies, it seems to be up there for two seconds! I am told that it was snipped out of earlier video versions of the film. Return 2. The storytelling session is another uncensored addition to this DVD, even though there's no new footage. Previous subtitles had fudged some particulars in the erotic encounter on the beach, and the new subs are luridly accurate. Return 3. - But like all foreign films, these were routinely shown at between 1:66 and 1:78 ... I've seen the 35mm prints, and their burned-in subtitles are HIGH in the frame so as not to fall below the lower masking! Return [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use