Reflections
on “Persona”
Written
and directed by Ingmar Bergman
Starring
Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann
Ingmar Bergman’s
intriguing and deliberately perplexing film has prompted many interpretations
and while I cannot know what Mr Bergman’s original intentions were, I did come
up with a few ideas that helped me chart a way through the film and while this
is by no means a full analysis, I thought I would offer these few thoughts and
notes as a start point to engaging with the film and as a minor contribution to
the debate inspired by it.
In the middle of a
performance, actress Elizabeth Vogler stops, looks around as if she is seeing
things clearly for the first time, laughs and then ceases speaking. She
withdraws from the world and takes to her bed, and Elizabeth’s doctor assigns
nurse Alma to care for her. We then follow Alma and Elizabeth’s experiences in
trying to effect Elizabeth’s recovery in a summer house on the coast.
Elizabeth Vogler is
having an existential crisis, a breakdown if you will. In the midst of her
performance, she suddenly sees in the fabric of society a tissue of lies,
fabrications, pretences and falsehoods. Just as she is pretending to be someone
else whose emotions and reactions she is faking, she sees she is surrounded by
people who also act as they lie, pretend and compromise constantly in life.
The absurdity of this
realisation causes her to laugh but also evokes a desire to no longer
participate in this great existential conspiracy and turning away from truth,
and so she ceases to communicate and seeks to withdraw from society.
She has a short and somewhat
dry and academic conversation with her doctor who confirms Elizabeth’s
breakdown and allows her (and us) to understand the situation, though of course
this abstract diagnosis offers nothing in terms of a solution.
Thus, nursing sister Alma
is employed to care for Elizabeth. She will provide a form of therapy in the
hope of encouraging Elizabeth to re-engage with the world, and she hopes to
achieve this through open discussion, sympathy and emotional engagement.
However, in my opinion,
the key to understanding what is going on here is to recognise that Alma is the
product of Elizabeth’s psyche, fabricated to help her heal from her breakdown. Come
to that, I would suggest the scenes involving her doctor and perhaps even all
the scenes in the hospital are also fabrications of her mind. The conversation with
the doctor giving an analysis of Elizabeth’s condition may be based on a
memory, but it is too dry, condensed and unfeeling to be “real”. This is
Elizabeth’s hurt recollection of being more or less dismissed – bear in mind
the doctor suggests this is another role she should simply play out until she
tires of it. Indeed, this may be the reason Elizabeth invented Alma as an
instrument of helping herself.
The scenes between Alma
and the doctor are also inventions of Elizabeth’s mind. The rooms are very
plain with little detail and are quite nebulous, suggesting a dream-like nature,
and the conversation between the two is fairly abrupt, business-like and
unconvincing. Really, this is Elizabeth’s attempt to justify and convince
herself of Alma’s usefulness by way of the authority-figure of the doctor.
When Alma goes on to
introduce herself to Elizabeth, her speech rather resembles a character
synopsis you might find in the preface of a play, betraying, perhaps, her true
roots and Elizabeth’s mindset.
At the beach house, Alma
speaks to Elizabeth with familiarity, sweetness and affection. She speaks with
a childlike openness, innocence and purity, reflecting that part of Elizabeth’s
psyche – the sweet innocent girl she once was before being “corrupted” by
society, self-awareness and ambition. Alma’s purpose is to draw Elizabeth back
from disappointment, disillusion and despair. She is there to offer a different
perspective, gentle at first but becoming more assertive in time, while also
seeking understanding and clarification as to how Elizabeth arrived at this
juncture in her life. When Alma speaks, Elizabeth is effectively speaking to
and debating with herself.
Alma recounts a tale from
her past, offering an account, or a memory for Elizabeth, of how she and a
friend had sex on a beach with a couple of complete strangers, and this was the
greatest sexual experience of her life, before and after the event. The reason?
This was an act of pure, unbridled pleasure that involved no relationship,
pretence, compromise or façade such as she would undoubtedly go on to encounter
in her more socially traditional experiences, and this will prove relevant to events
at the beach house.
When Elizabeth’s husband
visits the beach house unexpectedly, he speaks sincerely and seriously to Alma
but he clearly sees Elizabeth, despite Alma’s protests she is not his wife. He
shows patient understanding and sympathy, and both share words of encouragement
and love, with Alma treating him like her husband and this culminates in
intimacy during which Alma tells him he is a wonderful lover but then gets very
upset and once again claims she is sick of lies and pretence.
Alma is Elizabeth and she
gets upset because her husband is not her greatest lover, as we now know, but
she feels she has to engage in lies and pretence in order to flatter and
appease her husband, the type of conduct Elizabeth has rejected and seeks to
escape.
When Alma and Elizabeth
have a face-to-face discussion regarding Elizabeth’s coldness toward her son,
Alma is clearly aware of Elizabeth’s innermost feelings and fears, and she
helps Elizabeth confront her own fear of responsibility, genuine emotion and
devotion, with no room for social fakery and acting.
As time passes, Alma and
Elizabeth’s personas seem to draw on one another and get ever closer. While
Alma still displays love and affection, she becomes visibly and audibly more
assertive as she tries to break through Elizabeth’s emotional isolation,
suggesting Elizabeth recognises the progress that has been made and she will
not allow herself to regress. Indeed, at one point their two faces are
conjoined, suggesting potentially conflicting attitudes and outlooks in a
single person and a need to come to terms with this by showing compassion and exercising
self-control.
At the end, just one
person gets on the bus to begin her journey home. Alma and Elizabeth have
become one.
A true and intense psychological
drama, “Persona” gives us an insight into the workings of the mind as it takes
us along for Elizabeth’s journey to recovery, aided by alter ego Alma.
I can’t say this is an
easy film, but it is intriguing, stimulating and rewarding.
My thanks for taking the
time to read this article. I hope you found it of some value.
Stuart Fernie (stuartfernie@yahoo.co.uk)
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