Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Holstra Boring, long, and too preachy.

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

classicsoncall The movie opens with a series of unconnected and somewhat disturbing images - the shearing of a sheep, a nail pounded into a victim's hand a la the crucifixion, dead people on slabs in a mortuary. Quick edits over the opening credits additionally lend a surreal flavor to the picture, so that we have no idea what's coming. If one were to view the opening montage once again after the picture concludes, one might be willing to connect the teenage boy to Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullman) as the son she bore who she wants no part of. One will have to decide.It seems to me this is the kind of film that's open to one's interpretation in the most personal of ways. Having read a few of the reviews for this movie, there are multiple thoughts on the film that appear just as valid as mine might be, some that even contradict each other. For this viewer, the dynamic between Elisabet and Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson) forces the caretaker to confront her own insecurities about life. In Elisabet, Alma foresees for herself a failed marriage, children she doesn't want, and abandoning a job that she likes for the sole reason of fitting into a society that expects those things from a woman.It's interesting how Ingmar Bergman's direction offers ambiguity in various scenes. When Lisabet tears up the picture of her son, does Alma witness that or not? When Mr. Vogler arrives he speaks to Alma as if she were his wife, leaving her in a state of confusion. However one of the principal ideas coming out of the film, that the personas of Lisabet and Alma are somehow merging together is one that never crossed my mind, even with the camera tricks of melding the two faces together. As I say, one will have their own thoughts and ideas about what occurs in the story, and who's to say that any one or another is valid or invalid? It's all open to interpretation.What elevates the picture to the rank of pure cinema can be found in it's artistic style and bold cinematography. Notwithstanding the early garish images, the film remains austere throughout with minimal backgrounds. The hospital room and the summer beach house are starkly furnished, as the camera focuses principally on the two women throughout. The story is an existentialist expression of it's director, and if one concentrates on the observation of The Doctor directly to patient Lizabeth, one might catch Bergman's elusive goal, to capture "the hopeless dream of being, not seeming, but being".

markmuhl Wow, this film really left me behind with ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, it offers excellent acting and truly beautiful black&white shootings of both landscape and human physiognomies, but on the other hand, there are so many obscure scenes in it that even studied psychologists have a hard time in explaining the meaning of it all. It surely was also in the Intention of director Bergman to leave space for interpretation but one should be careful not to overburden the spectator.I truly enjoyed the first two thirds of the movie, which are quite straightforward apart from the first five minutes of seemingly unconnected and quickly changing film sequences (one of them being a young boy longing for a big motherly face on a screen). A young nurse is assigned to a new patient, an actress, who seems to be healthy apart from the fact that a few months ago she fell into speechless silence. To support a better recovery they are both sent to a house on the beaches. The young nurse tries to fill in the gap of silence by telling stories of her own life. This is a bit like the situation on a psychiatrist's couch where the patient keeps on talking as an answer to the doctor's simple comments or even silence, only that the roles in this case are turned upside down, because the nurse takes over the role of the patient and the mute patient takes over the role of the psychiatrist. Her admiration for someone being an actor and appreciative smiles make the nurse become more and more trustful until she even makes confessions about sexual experiences and an abortion. She is wondering why sometimes she does not live up to her own standards. These monologues are in fact more entertaining than expected. They never really become too long and are supported by great acting.Then the nurse gets to read a letter written by her patient, in which the patient is passing on the nurse's private confessions and describes her as interesting to watch. From this moment on, the nurse feels betrayed in her affection to the patient and her behavior changes to hostile. I especially liked the scene where the nurse leaves a piece of broken glass on the floor hoping that her patient would step into it and when she does the actress for an instance is breaking her silence with an Ouch.Oddly enough, despite the tensions, the nurse, in the last third of the movie, starts more and more to project her own thoughts and fears (of being a bad mother unable to love her own child, maybe the boy from the beginning?) onto her never dissenting patient and seems to get one person with her. When the patient's husband is visiting, the nurse is even mistaken by the husband to be his own wife. In how far the nurse's projections meet with the patient's reality is hard to tell as the patient remains quite an unreadable book. Then in one scene, we see the nurse waking up, so probably all the oddities from the last third of the movie can be explained by being a dream reflecting the nurse's subconscious, which tells her to be lost in very much the same way as her patient.Is it about not being able to cope with the dishonesty and harshness of life that leads us into speechless isolation? Is it about all of us having more than one personality and normally showing only one of the many as a disguise? Is it even about behind this disguise being nothing? Or is it about not being able to help each other, since in the end, the patient still does not speak and both the nurse and the patient leave the house separately.Finally, I was sitting in front of the credits knowing to have seen something substantial but feeling a bit dizzy at the same time. Still, the positive impressions clearly predominate and therefore I give it 8 points out of 10.

elvircorhodzic PERSONA is a psychological drama that, with a strong emotion examines the relationship between an older mental patient and her pretty but lonely nurse. This is a film about the identity, self-centeredness, sex, lesbianism, motherhood and madness. The characters are very intimate, so that, a boundary of reality, in longing and despair, becomes a nightmare and a distorted picture in the mirror.The story revolves around a young nurse named Alma and her patient, a well-known actress named Elisabet Vogler. Elisabet is a stage actress who has suddenly fallen silent and still, although the doctors have determined it is not a result of physical illness or hysteria, but willpower. Alma is somehow fascinated with her patient. The doctor decides Elisabet will recover better in a cottage by the sea, and sends Alma and Elisabet there. A very strange relationship develops between the two women in this isolated environment...Mr. Bergman has put a very complex problems in a relatively simple framework. The research of an identity starts from the elemental drama, through visual poetry and dark fiction, to modern psychological analysis.The beginning of the film is outstanding, Mr. Bergman has managed to disrupt an illusion of reality with some dark symbols including a crucifixion. It is important that impressions are different. That is the point of this melodic game between the desire, repression and insanity. The atmosphere is in an opposite contrast with the environment.Liv Ullmann as Elisabet is the silent patient. Her reactions are a distorted reflection on her beautiful face. Her lips analyze and test. Bibi Andersson as Alma is a nurse who often leads monologues in which she lacks at a word on the other side. Just one word uttered by her patient will scare away the fog that slowly descends between them. However, words slowly dying, while her lips move in fear of a truth.

quinimdb During the opening to this film, I had no idea what kind of movie I was watching. It shows film unrolling in a projector, gore, a strange silent film for a few seconds, and finally an old woman, cut in with pictures of a young boy, laying down in seemingly the same room. We see him wave his hand in front of what seems to be a large screen. We see our main characters appear. The credits start. I think this montage is to show us that we are watching a film, and the potential for what it can be at that moment is endless, considering its up to the creator to decide. This fits in with what we learn about Elisabet Vogler, an actress who suddenly, during an audition, got silent, and had a "sudden urge to laugh", and she has not said a word since. We learn she does have a husband and a life, and she even clearly cares for him, so this sudden change is perplexing to many. But it is this sudden change that shows that the individual is completely in control of their persona, and can change it at any minute. In fact, we all do it, as demonstrated by the nurse of Elisabet, Alma. Almost daily we change our outward personality depending on who we are with and when and where. The film suggests we are almost never exactly who we are on the inside. But the most thought provoking question the film presents is this: can we change who we are on the inside?The answer is yes throughout the film. Alma, at one point in the film, has a long monologue about a boy she slept with on a beach, how it was the best sex ever (yet she still feels guilty), how she got pregnant from the kid (but had sex with her husband the same night), and how her husband and her both got an abortion, but were happy they did. She mentions that she felt like a different person when it was happening. Throughout the film it seems that the two characters are merging into one, and my theory is that they are both the same person. When Alma is delivering the mail for Elisabet, she realizes her mail isn't sealed, and checks it. It involves Almas personal story, and it says that Elisabet is studying Alma. Alma feels offended and wants to get her to finally stop and talk. There is a long scene involving Elisabet walking around and finally stepping on a shard of glass Alma accidentally shattered, this seems to be Alma attempting to get Elisabet to talk, or react in any way, but all she hears is "ow!". Suddenly, Elisabet's husband finds her and Alma, but Alma is talking to him. At first she says, "I am not your wife". But he goes on about how "you love somebody, or say you do... it gives you security, a chance to endure, doesn't it?" which calls back to Alma earlier in the film when she reads her letter to Elisabet that was from Mr. Vogler, and both times he mentions that they both treat each other as "anxious children", and what matters is their intentions. This also calls back to when Alma reads "all our faith and doubt is evidence of our loneliness". Elisabet stands in the room as they have sex, but I believe she is only metaphorically there, in that she is a part of Alma and vice versa. The next scene involves Alma talking to Elisabet about her being told she cannot be a mother, then feeling that she needs to prove to herself and others that she can be a good mother then becoming terrified when she gets pregnant then wanting an abortion but having it fail multiple times then hating the child, but the child loved her unconditionally so it was hard. Then, this same scene plays again, only this time we are watching Alma and not Elisabet. This is another nod to the director being able to control the film entirely, but also, at the end of this one, Elisabets face is superimposed over half of Almas. So, if Alma and Elisabet were the same person, why would they have two different stories of getting pregnant and having a successful abortion and one failed abortion? I believe the failed abortion is true, but Elisabet is Almas suppressed true inner feeling of being an "actor" in everyday life. She sometimes plays different roles, during the pregnancy, the role of the happy expectant mother. Of course these almost never align with her inner self, as stated before. But ultimately it shows that we all have multiple "people" to us, even on the inside. And sometimes we can even convince ourselves that we are a different type of person for our own sake. I think Elisabet does this when she invents Alma, who had a successful abortion. Of course we never go as far as literally convincing ourselves that something different happened to us in the past, but it's a metaphor for how we choose different personalities even internally. Life may seep back through and prevent us from doing so, but we go back to hide ourselves from the horrors of the world.This is a very complex movie, especially for taking up only a short 85 minutes of my day, but I can promise it will inhabit your mind for much longer than that. It cuts from past to present at random, blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, and sometimes deviates completely from the main story to show us that we're watching a film with strange montages. It's about life, the human race, our psychology, film itself, and sometimes nothing at all. It's the most perplexing film I've seen since "Last Year At Marienbad" and thats intentionally perplexing. I mean all of this in the best way. It is one of a kind.