Ingmar Ernst Bergman
PERSONA

Tragic strong persona vulpes viderat.

The film is the deliberately sparse and essential story of the relationships two women are forced to live when one of them suffers an attack of aphasia and the other is tasked with providing her paramedical assistance and companionship during convalescence. The first of the two is a well-established and famous actress who, during the performance of a play - specifically Sophocles' Electra - is struck on stage by a strange ailment: she suddenly loses the ability to speak. The other is a twenty-five-year-old nurse who, in the first "regular" scene of the film, is summoned to the office of the clinic's director who assigns her the task of following and assisting the "ill" actress. In a play of identity taken to extreme consequences, the two women draw physically close, to the point of intertwining, almost merging. It was not by chance that a ...first regular scene of the film was mentioned earlier. Because, indeed, the film begins in a way, let’s say ...irregular. It starts, in fact, with a long prologue, lasting 6 minutes. With it, the Master intends to warn us that we are about to witness a staging, an illusion, a cinematic fiction, indeed. Upon its release, the film was received as highly experimental in the cinematic techniques Bergman used to convey the sense of incommunicability typical of his poetics. It was experimental in the study of light and photography, masterfully directed by Sven Nyquist, and experimental in its editing technique, new and revolutionary, by Ulla Righe. It's indeed observable, in the analysis of Bergman’s cinematography, how “Persona” represents another new solution to the problem of representing human and social inner dramas, in this specific case an aseptic, cold, sometimes hallucinatory, and at any rate unprecedented solution within the artistic panorama of the Swedish filmmaker. It could be said that Bergman of “Persona” meets the Strindberg of “The Stronger,” to the "point where it's easy to see how Bergman's (later) film shares many points with Strindberg's bourgeois drama. It can also be added that the problem of Strindberg's "incommunicability" and "silence" intersect their path with the respective issues elaborated in Bergman's cinema. The film is the search for the characteristics that bind a pair of women, of which one is silent and the second is in continuous search of truth in the other. “Persona” is a film, very subtle and complex, besides the ones already mentioned, also on the theme of gender identity and the roles assigned to women by society. It is certainly not a coincidence that one of the two women is an actress, caught in an eternal moment of bewilderment while playing the role of Electra. However, there is something deeper, an intangible and elusive subtext, a sort of limited encyclopedia on the gender significance of being a woman. What the silent woman and the woman preyed by a kind of moralizing impulse seem to suggest are the extremities of a pendulum. On one side is the renunciation of oneself in favor of a role that can offer easy domestic happiness; on the other is the void of rebelling against the mask, which can provide the freedom of flight but also the precipice of a ruinous fall. Two extremes that are interchangeable, which seem opposite only because they are mirror images.