Which face are you? Bergman’s “Persona” (1966)
„[…] All the anxiety we bear with us,
all our thwarted dreams -
- the incomprehensible cruelty,
our fear of extinction -
- the painful insight
into our earthly condition -
- have slowly eroded our hope […]”
We all wear masks and are, more or less, perpetually aware of it. We like to imagine the masks being torn down; we fantasize about ridding ourselves of the need to “perform”, but to perform… is to live. Kafka once said that when he realized life is a costume party he thought himself a fool for attending with his real face; a fool with a “real” face is who Alma, Persona’s central character believes herself to be.
The film where the story unfolds shocks the viewer from the very beginning — incoherent, loud, nearing-on-obnoxious visuals, a flash of a male penis, and a goat being killed and turned inside out — not the kind of introduction one might expect from a worryingly insightful, life-changing, cinema-defining masterpiece, but it is, and it matters; it introduces us not only formulaically to the feature itself, but rather to the mind that is studied throughout — a mind shattered, riddled with existential dirt, mundane, raw and unfiltered. This no-punches-pulled approach is necessary to prepare for what’s to come — for a self-discovery journey of a troubled, unhappy woman, struggling to get a convincing grip on even a sliver of reality she desperately needs.
Elisabet is, to Alma, constitutive. Through her, Alma learns and confronts her life’s turning points, and finally gets to express and share, fully indulging in what is, at its core, a movie-long soliloquy converging on themes of existentialism, fulfillment, love, aging, and self-perception.
The film is crafted so beautifully it can bring a tear to the eyes with a single frame, and can induce disgust in the next — it captures the defining characteristics of life. Though not an easy or straightforward picture, it can be compelling to a wide range of audiences, because Bergman so clearly grasps the fundamentals of psychology and lays them out for all to see and study, that what Persona effectively becomes, is a brutally reflective insight into the human condition.
📹·📹·📹·📹·½ ∕5
