Persona and The Tree of Life

I think like most people, my holidays have not been too interesting. However, I've watched some pretty cool movies lately. I watched Persona, a pretty old movie I watched at home and I saw The Tree of Life, which I actually had to go out to the cinemas to see.

Persona was a very perplexing movie. It's basically about a nurse who looks after a woman who refuses to speak even though she is perfectly healthy and sane. I don't remember feeling so confused watching a movie since David Bowman transformed into a giant glowing baby in 2001. Partly I was surprised because I've seen several of Bergmann's other films and they were very different to this. Usually his style is quite straightforward, such as in The Seventh Seal where to visualise a man contemplating the nature of death, he actually shows him playing chess with the Grim Reaper. This movie is much more mystifying and it is often difficult to see what's real and what isn't. Bergmann likes to play around with the audience and he does things like making the film look like its burning up or turning the camera around to show the film crew, like he's trying to say it doesn't matter because it's all a movie anyway.

The Tree of Life was probably just as non-sequitur and unconventional but I found it a lot easier to understand. It's about a family of three boys growing up in 1950s Texas though there are strange intermissions where he cuts to epic scenes that highlight the miracle of life: the formation of galaxies, thermal activity in the Earth's initial formation, the evolution of life and dinosaurs. His goal is to make a connection between our everyday lives and the terrifying grandness of the universe. I read a lot about this film before I watched it and I was kind of skeptical how you could alternate between these two plot threads without ruining the flow of the movie but it works because they're united in tone and atmosphere. Despite asking all kinds of big questions, it's a pretty emotional film.





EDIT: I'm gonna watch Spirited Away next so I'll probably write something about that next time.