Ingmar Bergman
Persona

"you chase a desperate dream, this is your torment: you want to be and not seem to be...to be aware of yourself and vigilant at every moment, and at the same time you realize the abyss that separates what you are to others from what you are to yourself, almost causing a sense of vertigo at the fear of being discovered, being laid bare, unmasked, brought back to your proper limits since every word is a lie, every word is falsehood, every smile a grimace...what is the most difficult role?"

Yesterday I just watched one of the films that enters the circle of films that I love the most: this work is so dense with meanings, symbols and associations that I think it is very difficult to explain and find meanings common to all, and the director manages to do so with very few elements: a cold, livid clinic, a deserted beach, two young women and their ghosts, their subconscious and their fears.

The film tells us about Elisabet Vogler, a young theater diva, who, during the performance of Elektra, becomes mute and subsequently decides not to speak anymore. The woman is entrusted to Alma, a young nurse (and also somewhat of an educator) who is optimistic, sure of herself, and about to get married, who thus has to take care of and try to help her, but every effort by the latter seems futile.

Alma concerns herself with giving affection and attention to Elisabeth, who remains closed in her narcissistic isolation: if on one hand, the actress's choice of silence is a way to avoid being misunderstood as a person, between essence and appearance it is therefore a protest of herself, with silence no one can confuse what is and what seems: this way, she does not have to act anything but just be. On the other hand, it is also a disdainful rejection of others, denying the need for the other, her dependency to enclose herself in the ivory tower of her Ego Ideal. The clinic's director decides to send the two women to her solitary seaside house, convinced that a little rest might improve the artist's condition.

Here, a strange and ambiguous friendship develops between the two: Alma begins to trust and confide in Elisabet, and during the day and night, she tells her about her life, her first loves, her sexual triangles with strangers, and the resulting abortion: while Alma talks, the other woman remains in constant silence listening to her, and perhaps seems to understand her; indeed, at a certain point, the nurse says, "no one had deigned to listen to me, it feels so good to talk..." and it almost seems that the therapy has reversed with the patient as the therapist and vice versa. The idyll is broken when Alma discovers that Elisabet has written all her secrets in a letter, where she mocks her and says that she's having fun studying her and thinks the nurse has fallen for her.

True or false, the sense of betrayal brings the role reversal between the two to its extreme consequences; whether it's identification with the other as an alter ego of the hidden part of oneself, projective identification, transference countertransference, pulsion catharsis, or splitting shown in the film through a total ambiguous complicity between the two, a relationship of total ambivalence, of hate and love.

Alma initially seems unwilling to accept this reversal and thus rebels against it by offending Elisabet, attacking her with her anger, and beating her until threatening her with a pot of boiling water, such that Elisabet will speak for an instant, but at a certain point, one wonders who is who.

The two women, in fact, seem the same and become the same in the film: Alma first reproaches Elisabet the desire for her child to be born dead for fear of leaving the theater, then turns the accusation on herself, who has aborted, but always speaking in the third person of the other: with negation and projection, we thus come to a complete identification of the two "bad mothers" with the two faces becoming one: who is the Persona? what Latin meant as the theatrical mask and for Jung the exterior demeanor? and who is the true personality, the true inner soul (Alma)? Elisabet had taken Alma's soul through her silences and now it seems to shout all the truth, the pain, and the hidden evil behind the last theatrical mask of Elisabet's silence.

However, reality remains external to this entire dreamlike situation as the child that Bergman places in the prologue and the finale: it is imprisoned in the film and can only limit itself to touching a faded and changing image of the mother woman.

Thus, the Master with his extremely succinct, clean, neutral style, made of intense close-ups, dreamlike images, and an extraordinary use of black and white, gives us a work full of suggestions and meanings, which I wasn't able to fully express here, on life and fiction. Finally, continually to emphasize the skill, the mastery and the perfection of the performances of Liv Ullmann, who with absolute perfection manages to render all the pain, corruption, and drama through her gaze, and of Bibi Andersson, who shouts all the torments and passions of the human soul to us.