Persona

This is another film that was entirely in Swedish, so very difficult for me to understand and follow.

If we take away the fact that it was in another language then i can happily say that I enjoyed the film. A more psychological film that focused on what happens when you have two people, one that doesn't talk at all and one that talks all the time. This is a common issue that we face with most teenagers and although this film shows the extreme effects of what can happen, it is good to have a reminder of that.

The belief that you can lose yourself when you spend your entire talking to someone and getting no response is strong. The way that this film was set out- a nurse and a patient helped to make it feel more real. When you spend all your time talking to yourself then you do start to feel as if you are going insane, as if you are trapped in a mental assylum with no one but yourself as company.
This is another film that so much of it was dependent on the character that doesn't talk. The genius of her character was how silent she was and the mastermind behind that. I often feel that it takes a great actor to pull of delivery of speech efficiently but an even greater actor to master the silent character perfectly. It is not easy to sit on set for hours on end and not say anything without looking incredibly bored and fed up. To maintain that level of intensity was something else and I feel that she should have won an award just for that!

This film's initial release was in Sweden and so far I have only seen one other film that was filmed in Sweden and that was The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo. This film is very Swedish.

Famed stage stress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffers a moment of blankness during a performance and the next day lapses into total silence. Advised by her doctor to take time off to recover from what appears to be an emotional breakdown, Elisabeth goes to a beach house on the Baltic Sea with only Anna (Bibi Andersson), a nurse, as company. Over the next several weeks, as Anna struggles to reach her mute patient, the two women find themselves experiencing a strange emotional convergence.