Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman are equally, and in totally opposite ways, brilliant as a nurse and her charge, an actress who has shut down as part of an emotional breakdown. They retreat to the seaside where Andersson tries to help Ullman heal her weary soul, but the tables quickly turn as the nurse, filling the silence, reveals more and more about herself until it's questionable who is healing whom. The premise is fertile enough terrain to ensure dense psychological exploration, but Bergman blurs the lines further by intensifying the sense that the two characters are actually Freudian representations of a single person (no, Fight Club didn't come up with that on its own), and additionally uses cinematic deconstruction to reflect the inherent falsehood and disappointment of human behavior. He obliterates any kind of sympathetic view of humanity as well as all notions of cinema as a truthful philosophical conduit—and in doing so, he paradoxically deepens cinema's potential to reveal the human condition to the most brutally honest extent. It's visually stunning, endlessly challenging, and so well performed as to be frightening, casting light into some of our darkest shadows, where we just don't want to look. Existentialism has never been more thoroughly erotic, nor surrealist filmmaking so poignant. Persona embodies a lot of unexpected dualities, the unified presentation of which is singularly masterful.
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