Ingmar Bergman's identity-collapse drama. Two women, one Swedish island, and the film whose form is its argument.
Sweden, mid-1960s. Elisabet Vogler, a stage actress in her early thirties, has gone mute during a performance of Electra and has remained mute in the months since. She is psychologically intact; she simply refuses to speak. A young nurse, Alma, is assigned to care for her. The doctor proposes that the two women spend the summer at the doctor's coastal cottage on a remote Swedish island.
On the island, Alma — given a silent listener — begins to confess to Elisabet things she has never told anyone, including a sexual experience on a beach with two teenage boys that resulted in a pregnancy and abortion. The relationship between the two women progressively intensifies. Alma reads a letter Elisabet has written about her; Alma's identification with Elisabet begins to fracture. The film closes with a partial collapse of the boundary between the two women, dramatised in the famous image of their faces merging into a single composed face.
Persona is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-influential European art films ever made. The film's pre-credit montage — a sequence of disjointed images including a film projector starting up, a slaughterhouse, a hand being nailed to a wall, a young boy reaching toward a screen on which the faces of the two women blur — is a formal statement that the film is, in some sense, about cinema itself. The opening warns the audience that the conventional narrative grammar they expect will not be delivered.
Stanley Kubrick reportedly studied Persona before making 2001. David Lynch's filmography is unimaginable without it. Park Chan-wook, Charlie Kaufman, Darren Aronofsky have all cited the film as foundational. The film's specific gift was to demonstrate that cinema's formal apparatus — the projector, the film stock, the editing — could itself be made into part of the dramatic content of a film. Almost every subsequent self-reflexive film of the past sixty years is in conversation with Persona.
Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann — both Bergman regulars — share approximately every scene in the film. The two performances are structurally interlocked. Andersson's Alma is the talker; Ullmann's Elisabet is the silent listener. The film's central argument — that listening can be more powerful than speech, that the silent observer can effectively annex the talker's identity — depends on the two actors trusting each other across long scenes in which one of them does almost nothing.
Ullmann was 28 during production; this was her first major collaboration with Bergman. The partnership would continue for decades, with Ullmann appearing in roughly a dozen Bergman films and eventually directing several of Bergman's late screenplays after his death in 2007. The performance in Persona is foundational to her career — a role almost entirely in close-up reaction, with no dialogue, that nonetheless functions as one of the film's two leads.
The film's most-iconic image is a brief composite shot in which the left half of Alma's face and the right half of Elisabet's face are combined into a single composed face. The shot appears late in the film and is held for roughly five seconds. It is, on the page, a small technical effect. In context, it is one of the most-striking single images in 1960s cinema.
The shot has been quoted and homaged across decades of subsequent cinema. The basic image — two characters whose identities are merging, dramatised in a face-composite — appears in Mulholland Drive, Black Swan, Fight Club, and many others. Persona is the source. What the shot argues is that the line between Alma's identity and Elisabet's has dissolved; the film, having spent eighty minutes leading the audience to that point, makes the dissolution literal.