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. It's not a time record, but we're invited to stare for quite a long while at Ullman's reclining face as darkness falls around her.

Alma and Elisabet very closely resemble each 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 (if my doctor would send me to her beach house, I'd stop talking too!) that Bergman has confected to play his visual games.

At this point the story sort of breaks down into Bergman's filmic experiments. His films of this period focus on psychological deterioration, and here he definitely expresses it 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. It 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 Weegee would pawn on us.

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 - gee, 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 too much for Elisabet as well, I guess. All of these intellectual themes seem like bad cinema compared to the honest believability of Bergman's actresses. The movie does have a rare dimension of emotional intimacy that's not to be found anywhere else, not even in Bergman films. It's a lot of people's favorite foreign Art film.

Unfortunately, all the well-intentioned Web outrage will probably result in MGM steering clear of any more High-Art special editions.

The image quality is great, and it's nice to be able to remove the subs 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. Once again, 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's still 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