"Once again, Ingmar Bergman is bringing us into contact with two strangely troubled young women and exploring the sensitive movements of their minds in his new Swedish film, Persona....And once again he is inviting (or compelling) his audience to engage in studious efforts at interpretation or simply outright involvement of themselves, empathically and esthetically, and let the egos and ids fall where they may. The latter would seem the better purpose with which to approach this lovely, moody film which, for all its intense emotionalism, makes some tough intellectual demands. For its evident contemplation of a singular phenomenon of transfer of personality between an older mental patient and her pretty, lonely nurse is rich in poetic intimations of subconscious longings and despairs, and it is likely to move one more deeply as poetry than as thought."



"In this film, as in his very early Prison, the writer-director Ingmar Bergman involves us in the making of a movie. He gives us a movie within a movie, but he seems hardly to have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner one. (You can feel it go—at the repeated passage, when the director seems to be trying an alternate way of shooting a sequence.) It's a pity, because the inner movie had begun to involve us in marvellous possibilities: an actress (Liv Ullmann) who has abandoned the power of speech is put in the care of a nurse (Bibi Andersson), and the nurse, like an analysand who becomes furious at the silence of the analyst, begins to vent her own emotional disturbances. The two women look very much alike, and Bergman plays with this resemblance photographically by suggestive combinations and superimpositions. Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman's not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. There is, however, great intensity in many of the images, and there's one great passage: the nurse talks about a day and night of sex on a beach, and as she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her voice and the emptiness of her present life in her face, viewers may begin to hold their breath in fear that the director won't be able to sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. But he does, and it builds and builds and is completed. It's one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history."



"Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches. Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann exchange identities to the accompaniment of much musing about art, life, and politics, all of it much more obscure than is strictly necessary."