Persona's still-haunting sliver mirror

There is no settling into Persona (1966), so let’s not settle in. A projector’s viscera glows white hot, whirring celluloid flutters by, a cartoon prototype appears, then a shard of silent slapstick: set to modernist horror movie music, the prelude reminds us we’re watching a movie; it’s also incorporating spectatorship into the realm of its story. A sheep is slaughtered, a spike is driven through a hand, a tarantula crawls across a white surface, a bespectacled boy (Jörgen Lindström) wakes up in, it seems, a morgue; at least, the elderlies sharing his pale space look dead enough. Perhaps the unnerving images that preceded were excerpts from his dreams; perhaps they were the dreams of the dead surrounding him, their psychic vapour. The boy tries to read Lermontov (!), but gets distracted, like us, by the screen, or, for him, the lens, but, actually, a barring window or membrane separating him from the dissolving images of two women’s faces. He reaches out, to that screen-lens-membrane, to us, to the women, or some elusive, amorphous mother that the pair represents. Hard cut. Prelude over. Roll opening credits. We’re not so much acclimatized for Persona as sufficiently jarred to enter it.

Nearly 50 years after its debut, Persona can seem less like a linear experience than a cinematic ecosystem, a movie-place containing interconnected elements, most famously, images of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, the film’s ingenious actresses, their merging and/or interlocking faces and hair. But that sense of the film as an object to behold and puzzle over dissolves once you start watching it. The opposite of ponderous, the economy of the opening expository scenes is bracing. Alma (Andersson), the nurse, is debriefed by her superior (Margaretha Krook) about their their new patient, Elizabet (Ullman), an actress who stopped speaking one night while playing Elektra on stage and has yet to recover. A hard cut to a brief flashback appears in the midst of this: a tight close-up of Elizabet in the moment of her sudden pause—a pause yet to be broken. It’s as though, all at once, a veil fell away and she became paralyzingly aware of the sham of her performance, or of this play, and that awareness followed her into the rest of life. Authenticity was in that moment all but drained from the world, through the rare moments when she’s presented with something undeniably authentic—a television broadcast of a self-immolating monk in Vietnam, a photo from Jürgen Stroop’s report on the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—she recoils.

Does Elizabet’s crisis mirror that of Persona’s writer and director, Ingmar Bergman? He’d spend the first part of the 1960s making increasingly strange, inventive and claustrophobic films exploring the traumas and liberation of living in the absence of God. During those same years younger filmmakers were renovating film language, making the movies exhilaratingly self-conscious, producing, for example, movies about genre in place of more genre movies. With Persona, Bergman took that new self-consciousness and went inward instead of outward—he applied these new tools to an exploration of inner life. As Paul Schrader eloquently puts it in an interview included in Criterion’s superlative new Persona DVD/Blu-ray package, Persona is a milestone not because it was the first shot in a revolution but, rather, because it was the second. Me, I didn’t live through the revolution in question, but this second shot, once it came to me, was the one that wounded me permanently. I first saw Persona when I was 16, and it was the most transfixing, mysterious and, frankly, erotic experience with moving images I’d had. It remains all of those things for me. I’ve seen thousands of movies since, but every time I come back to Persona all those movies seen only heighten and reinforce my appreciation.

I was saying something about story, and, truly, for at least half of Persona the story remains crisp, clipped, just cryptic enough to intrigue. Alma and Elizabet are sent to Alma’s superior’s cottage on the island of Fårö. It’s summer, the sun never sets, and the scene seems idyllic. Elizabet remains mute, but her beguiling face could be read as sympathetic, even fascinated. So Alma talks and talks and her life, which she previously described as “decided,” begins to seem looser, at once less fixed and more interesting. She tells stories, and in the same way that this movie works as profoundly as it does because it acknowledges its movieness, her stories possess the transfixing-mysterious-erotic power they do because they come to us as stories—flashbacks would never have the same impact as the sentences so deftly delivered by Andersson. Elizabet becomes something like a best friend, or a therapist, or a vampire—later on she’ll actually drink blood. Does she truly care about Alma’s life and career, or about that impromptu orgy she partook in and never told a soul about before? Is Elizabet genuinely interested in Alma or just searching for material? For an artist, maybe for actors (and writers) most of all, are both things not always in play?

Persona’s key moment, or the whole movie in one scene: Alma in bed, the night not dark but slivery, the air almost smoky, and Elizabet soundlessly enters her room like a Japanese ghost. Like the boy, the two women will gaze into the screen or mirror, faces close, stroking hair, a seduction, a spiritual merger… And then comes some sort of betrayal; petty revenge; a simmering resentment that briefly tears up the physical substance of film itself; friendship becomes a duel; then a visit from Elizabet’s confused husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) and a turning of tables—maybe Elizabet’s real fear wasn’t of being false but of being ordinary, like Alma. You can explore the emotional geometries in this movie for ages. This is the trick: certain fundamental mysteries endure, but the character dynamics and the feelings involved are only too identifiable. “Persona” means mask and masks continually fall away in Persona. But, in spite of all these haunting close-ups, how do we know for certain when we’ve arrived at a real face?   

Persona was always my number one when it came to movies that I felt begged for inclusion in the Criterion Collection. Criterion hasn’t neglected this happy occasion. This gorgeous new package has the best looking transfer I’ve seen. The strongest supplements are, for me, the interviews: one with Andersson, Bergman and Ullman at the time of the film’s release; one with Bergman from 1970 for Canadian television; a new interview with Ullman, in which she emphasizes the rigour of Bergman’s collaborative process and the many important elements that were discovered only during production or in the editing room; and the aforementioned interview with Schrader, who supplies sturdy historical context and still beams like a schoolboy when expressing his admiration for this film. If you could see my face right now, I suspect I’m beaming too. 

                    

Taken by the waves

To be truly alone, to prepare, travel, hurl oneself into prolonged isolation: we can reduce this to some stoic, masculine, perhaps inherently literary ideal—books, after all, are a way of being alone, while movies have traditionally brought people together—but there is something universal, even spiritual, in the pursuit of solitude. Somewhere, somehow, the protagonist of J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost resolved himself to such a pursuit. We meet him on a yacht in the Indian Ocean. He’s old but very fit, handsome, almost certainly affluent, clearly a skilled sailor. He exudes discipline. We might envy or admire his ability to fulfill his resolution to be alone. But solitude can come with a chilling price. The man’s punishment for trying to get away from the world might be to be banished from it forever, to die alone, unable to ask for consolation, much less help. A drifting shipping container has pierced his yacht’s hull. He wakes to find the cabin flooded, the onboard electrical system malfunctioning. He does not show panic—is panic something we only show when there’s someone to show it to? He doesn’t talk to himself. He takes care of business, scaling the mast, patching the hole, trying to repair the radio. Days pass. At one point he shaves—perhaps it helps to retain habits in a crisis. Is the man doomed, as the title implies? He’s played by Robert Redford, giving his most compelling performance, a one-man show, all action, no talk. But just because he’s Robert Redford doesn’t mean we get a happy ending. And All is Lost isn’t about endings. It’s a film of moments, each heightened by the knowledge that it could be the last.

I found Chandor’s debut, the corporate drama Margin Call, a little overrated, maybe because we were so hungry for a movie to talk about the financial crisis. But All is Lost, the antithesis of Margin Call in many regards, is extraordinary, a cinematic stunt, but one that’s captivating and teeming with unspoken meaning—save a brief opening voice-over, a curse, and a few garbled fragments transmitted on the dying radio, there is no dialogue. (An instructive to the makers of Gravity: you actually can tell an engaging story of survival without having to cram every scene with chatter.) What is the man’s name? What was his career? Does he have a family? Did he abandon them? Or they him? What brought him here? The questions are richer than any answers could be. In lieu of answers we watch, listen, and very quickly begin to find ourselves in that sinking ship. (One interesting link to Margin Call: the guilty shipping container is leaking shoes, an exceedingly subtle commentary on global economics. The affluent American is imperiled by a container carrying goods produced in developing countries by underpaid workers so as to better line the pockets of affluent Americans.)

Chandor sticks close to his man, even during sequences in which most directors would be tempted to cut away. The yacht does summersaults during a nocturnal tempest, and Chandor smartly films the entire sequence from inside the cabin, a small world turning upside-down. An image of Redford asleep in his hammock above the flooded cabin, personal items afloat in the soup, recalls Tarkovsky. As the film progresses, there are occasional shots of life below the surface—the world that threatens to consume the man. Alex Ebert’s score stays mostly level with the environmental sounds, only rarely surfacing to heighten mood when things get especially dire. I can’t say enough about the rare degree of rigour applied to this more or less mainstream movie. All is Lost prizes a truly immersive cinematic experience over cozy tropes. It asks only for the sort of attention one might apply to one’s own solitude. 

         

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space

In the beginning there is only heavens and Earth, and, in truth, the beginning is about as good as Gravity ever gets. But that beginning, which is to say the 20 minutes or so that precede the launch of the film’s rather earthbound narrative, offers one of the most amazing sensory experiences you’ll have at the cinema for some time. We see stars and darkness, then swirling Earth, then people and hardware, everything eerily buoyed by zero-gravity. Soon we too feel weightless. Sinuous? Drifting? Attempts to describe the quality of the movement of Emmanuel Lubezki’s 3D camera, of the bodies and objects onscreen, strain our existing vocabulary.

“Life in space is impossible,” says the opening title card. Apparently shooting as though you’re in space ain’t so easy either. Director Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and his team of special effect geniuses spent four and a half years making Gravity. I lack the technical chops to explain how they did it. The story however, co-scripted by Cuarón and his son Jonás, is pretty simple, though it should have been even simpler. At first veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and newbie Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are doing minor repairs to their spacecraft’s exterior. All we hear is breath and heartbeats and fuzzy conversations with Houston. A running joke has Matt beginning a sentence with “I have a bad feeling about this mission.” Until it’s no longer a joke. Space debris rips their ship apart and kills their colleagues. Untethered in the nothingness with oxygen supplies rapidly depleting, Matt and Ryan must find a shuttle to get them home ASAFP.

The premise is fine. It imbues Gravity with urgency, stakes and, well, gravity. What’s less appealing is the cliché expository chatter that comes along with saving Dr. Ryan; she’s got a psychic wound that dovetails all-too-neatly with her current dilemma. What’s truly irritating is Lord of the Rings composer Steven Price’s overbearing score, which keeps bombarding us long after the debris shower ends and reaches yet another crescendo at the drop of a helmet. That aforementioned title card notes how there’s no way for sound to travel in space. “I like the silence,” Ryan says in an early scene—well, so much for that! In short, by certain conventional standards Gravity can be disappointing. But Gravity is not a conventional film. It is flawed. It is also, in its way, transcendent.

         

Fairy tale goes fashionably retro-formalist

Spanish writer/director Pablo Berger’s second feature transports the titular Brothers Grimm fairy tale—Blancanieves is a literal translation of Snow White—to a mythical 1920s Andalucia brimming with flamenco dancers, bullfighters and other such regional kitsch. In keeping with the period setting, Berger relays his vaguely feminist revision as a monochromatic silent film, replete with title cards and antiquated effects. I attended a number of film festivals over the course of the last year where the film was screening and noticed a consistently divided response: viewers seemed either charmed or irritated. I fell more into the latter camp—in part because of the film’s incessant camp.

To give credit to the complexity of both Berger’s motives and the film’s layered qualities, Blancanieves is a peculiar beast, at once an obvious labour of love—the film could hardly have been easy to finance—and a work shrewdly calibrated to adhere to current cinephile fashion, such as retro formalism—à la Tabu, The Artist and Guy Maddin’s entire career—and fairy tale re-visitation, evident in various other recent versions of Snow White. It is an ostensible love letter to some Spanish past but is shamelessly pitched to an international market, sticking closely as it does to the broadest possible cultural stereotypes. It felt to me both pandering and academic, which is a rare enough combination, I suppose. Perhaps it is too much the supposedly critic friendly film—the sort that brings out the unfriendly side of this critic.

Our heroine is one Carmen (Macarena García), daughter of a beloved toreador (Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho) and a flamenco dancer (Inma Cuesta). Mom dies in childbirth, dad gets paralyzed by a bull named Lucifer, and so along comes Encarna (Maribel Verdú, Y Tu Mamá También). Like Phyllis Nirdlinger in Double Indemnity, Encarna worms her way into the family via her role as a kindly nurse, but once she assumes the role of stepmother she proves plenty wicked. The most appealing, iconoclastic spin on the familiar renditions of Snow White is the way Berger imbues Carmen with more agency and grit. Gender restrictions be damned, this Snow White is following Dad’s slippered footsteps into the ring. She becomes a great bullfighter. What else? Oh, the dwarves. There are seven of them. I guess they’re kind of funny.

I frequently felt frustrated by Blancanieves’ simplistic emotional landscape and its insistence on slavishly appropriating silent era tics without bringing anything very fresh to the exercise (this is what I meant when I called it academic). My favourite scene by far was the final, somber one, tinged with tragedy and genuine mystery. Yet when I saw the film for the first time in Toronto, Berger immediately took the stage afterwards for a Q&A and rather smugly confessed that he deliberately chose an ambiguous finale because he figured that would make the film seem smarter. So if it seems like I’m picking on the film, let me say that it’s kind of asking to be picked on. If you’re willing to simply take pleasure in its handsomely photographed surfaces, you probably won’t feel as ornery.