The Face That Comes Apart

Two women share a house by the sea, and by the end you are no longer sure they are two. That is the whole of Persona and also nowhere near it. Elisabet Vogler is a famous stage actress who has simply stopped speaking. In the middle of a performance she fell silent, and she has not said a word since, though the doctors can find nothing wrong with her body or her mind. Alma is the young nurse assigned to care for her at a remote cottage. Alma talks and talks, because someone has to, and Elisabet listens, and slowly the listening woman begins to absorb the speaking one until their faces, in the film’s most famous image, fuse into a single divided face. Bergman made the film during a period of illness and exhaustion, and it has the quality of something dreamed by a mind that has run out of defences. It pairs with The Bell Jar more closely than any adaptation of Plath could, because both works are really about the same terrifying discovery, that the self you assume is solid and singular can crack, split, and start watching itself from outside.

Silence as refusal

Elisabet’s silence is the engine of everything, and it is crucial that it is a choice rather than an affliction. She is not mute. She has decided not to speak, and the decision reads as a refusal to go on performing, both on the stage and in the larger performance of being a functioning person. This is the same nerve Plath touches with Esther, and the same nerve Camus touches with Meursault. All three works circle a character who will no longer fake the feelings that social life demands, and all three treat that refusal as something between a breakdown and a protest, impossible to sort cleanly into either. Elisabet has looked at the endless role-playing that a life requires and has gone on strike. The horror and the strange dignity of the film both come from its refusal to tell us which of those two things her silence really is.

The face in the mirror, doubled

Plath’s novel returns obsessively to mirrors and to reflections that hand Esther back a face she cannot claim. Persona builds an entire film out of that single gesture. Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist shoot the two women in overlapping profiles, in half-light, one face sliding into the shadow of the other, until the celebrated shot in which half of Alma’s face and half of Elisabet’s are joined into one impossible portrait. It is the most literal image ever made of depersonalisation, the experience of the self splitting and observing itself as a stranger, which is exactly the state Plath spends her novel describing in prose. The film argues, as the book does, that identity is far more fragile than we like to believe, that under enough pressure a person does not simply suffer, she comes apart into pieces that no longer recognise each other.

The confession that flows one way

The long middle of the film is Alma talking, and the most extraordinary passage is a monologue in which she describes, in unbearable detail, a spontaneous sexual encounter on a beach years earlier and the abortion that followed. It is one of the most daring pieces of writing and performance in the period, delivered almost entirely in a single held take, and its power comes from the fact that Alma is confessing to a woman who gives nothing back. The confession flows in one direction only. Elisabet receives Alma’s secrets, her shame, her ordinary hopes about marriage and children, and offers nothing of herself in return, and gradually Alma comes to feel drained, used, as though the silent woman has been feeding on her. There is a quiet cruelty in the dynamic that the film refuses to soften. To open yourself completely to another person is to risk being consumed by them, and Bergman films that risk without blinking.

Motherhood and the unspeakable

Both The Bell Jar and Persona press on the same forbidden subject, the possibility that a woman might not want the role of mother that the culture treats as her natural fulfilment. Plath gives us Esther’s cold horror at the drugged, forgetful childbirth she witnesses. Bergman gives us the revelation, delivered twice in the film with the camera on each woman in turn, that Elisabet had a child she did not want, that she hoped it would die, and that she has never been able to love it. This is presented not as monstrousness but as a truth that the performance of ideal womanhood is designed to hide, and Elisabet’s silence starts to look like the only honest response available to a woman who cannot say the unsayable and will not say the expected lie. The film, like the novel, understands that some of what breaks a woman is simply the gap between what she is permitted to feel and what she actually feels.

The film that knows it is a film

Where Persona goes further than the novel is in turning its instrument on itself. It opens with a burst of fractured images, a projector lamp igniting, strips of old film, a nail driven through a palm, a boy reaching toward a blurred face on a screen. Partway through, at the moment of greatest strain between the two women, the image itself appears to tear and burn, as though the film cannot bear to continue and the illusion is collapsing in real time. Bergman is doing on the level of form what Plath does with her suspended ending, refusing to let the audience settle into the comfortable belief that they are watching a sealed, safe story that will resolve. The medium is made to flinch. The result is a work that is about breakdown and that also enacts one, so that the viewer is not merely told about a mind coming apart but is made, briefly, to feel the ground give way beneath the picture.

Where it sits in Bergman’s work

Persona arrived at a hinge in Bergman’s career. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s he had made film after film wrestling openly with the silence of God, culminating in a loose trilogy about faith and its absence, and by the middle of the decade that theological struggle had turned inward, from the absence of God to the instability of the self. Persona is the pivot. It throws off the period settings and religious frames of the earlier work for something stripped nearly to nothing, two women, a house, a stretch of beach, a handful of props, and it begins his long partnership with the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose grave, sculptural black and white gives the film its unearthly clarity. Bergman came from the theatre and never hid it, and the film has the concentration of a two-hander stage play, yet everything that matters in it is achieved by means only cinema possesses, the close-up held well past comfort, the slow dissolve of one face into another, the sudden rupture of the picture itself. It is the film in which a great director of words discovered how much could be said with a silent face.

Two women, or one mind

The most fertile way to read the film, and the one that ties it most tightly to Plath, is to treat Alma and Elisabet not as two separate people at all but as two halves of a single divided mind. On this reading the film is less about a relationship between women than about the war inside one person, between the part that speaks and performs and works to please, and the part that has fallen silent, that watches and judges and withholds. Alma is all surface, chatter, need, the social self that keeps the machinery running. Elisabet is the buried self that has seen through the performance and will no longer take part. Their merging then stops being a supernatural event and becomes a picture of what happens when those two halves of a person can no longer be held apart, when the watching self and the performing self collapse into one and the result is a face that is neither and both. This is exactly the fracture Plath maps in Esther, the sensation of being split into an actor and an appalled spectator of the act, and Bergman gives it the single most unforgettable image in the history of the form.

When the caretaker breaks

The relationship curdles, and the film is unsparing about how. Alma finds and reads a letter in which Elisabet describes her, warmly but clinically, as a fascinating little case to study, and the discovery that her confidante has been quietly observing her all along, turning her outpourings into material, is a small devastation. Alma’s care turns to cruelty. She leaves a shard of broken glass where Elisabet will step on it and watches to see it happen, and the film seems to tear and burn at that very instant, as though the medium itself cannot survive the betrayal. What Bergman traces here is how thin the line runs between caring for another person and feeding on them, between intimacy and invasion, and how quickly the one who has given everything can come to hate the one who only received. It is a colder, clearer account of human closeness than cinema usually permits itself, and it refuses to let either woman be simply the victim of the other.

The boy reaching for the face

The film is bracketed by a figure who belongs to neither woman’s story, a young boy who wakes in what looks like a morgue, puts on his glasses, and reaches up toward a vast, blurred face projected on a screen above him, a face that keeps shifting and will not resolve into a single likeness. He is reaching for a mother, or for meaning, or for the film itself, and the image is Bergman’s quiet confession of what art can and cannot do. We reach toward the faces on the screen wanting them to become clear, to give us a person we can hold, and they stay images, flickering and provisional, dissolving under our need. Wrapped around a story about a woman who will not speak and a nurse who cannot hold herself together, the boy becomes the viewer, and his failure to bring the face into focus becomes our own. It is the same gesture as Plath’s suspended jar, a refusal to let us believe that the thing we are watching can ever be fully resolved and set safely down.

Nothing is resolved, and that is the final thing it shares with Plath. Alma leaves. Whether anything has been healed or exchanged or stolen is left open. The two women may have merged and separated, or the whole encounter may have been a fever the film dreamed. Persona offers no cure and no verdict, only the lingering conviction that a person is a far more provisional thing than daily life admits, held together by effort and performance, capable at any moment of the quiet catastrophe of ceasing to cohere. It is a hard, beautiful, forbidding film, and more than half a century on it remains the most rigorous thing cinema has made about the subject Plath owned in prose.