Elisabet’s treatment soon finds the two women living together on a remote island cottage where the lines between where one of them ends and the other begins becomes blurred.
Persona doesn’t have a straight-forward narrative, though if you wanted to boil it down to the most simplistic terms it tells the story of Alma (Andersson), a young nurse, and her eventual patient Elisabet (Ullman), a stage actor, that has suddenly gone mute. While recovering in the hospital, and after after seeing a photo of Andersson and Ullmann together Persona was born, telling the story of two women who lose themselves in one another… or at least that’s one way of describing it. The film came about after Bergman fell ill in 1959 as he was planning on beginning work on a film with Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson titled The Cannibals. Persona is evidence that the answer is a resounding yes. I’ve been asked before if a film can still be enjoyable even if you don’t entirely understand it. I quickly followed that up with Wild Strawberries and have since come to own many of the iconic Swedish director’s films, and as much as I never believed anything he directed could effect me as much as Seventh Seal, Persona is a whole new level of filmmaking. The first Bergman film I saw was The Seventh Seal back in 2007 and I was immediately hooked. It’s hard to believe it has already been more than three years since Persona.
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