Persona — English subs

Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson play two women whose identities begin to merge in a seaside cottage. Persona centres on a famous actress who suffers a breakdown during a performance of Electra. She abruptly gives up acting and stops speaking altogether. Her crisis appears to stem from feelings of guilt towards her son: she feels unable to reconcile motherhood with her acting career. For her, theatre cannot replace life itself.

Liv Ullmann plays the actress, who is admitted to a hospital after her breakdown and retreats into silence. Bibi Andersson plays her nurse. Together, they move to a secluded cottage by the sea, where they grow increasingly intimate, with unsettling consequences. Ingmar Bergman creates a psychological portrait of two women caught up in an extreme blurring of identities.

Persona would become Bergman’s most successful film and one of his first to explicitly explore female relationships and emotions, themes that would become hallmarks of his work. Its treatment of subjects such as abortion and homosexuality made the film controversial for many years. The subject of countless analyses and interpretations by critics and academics, Persona has been described as the “Mount Everest of film criticism.”