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The Ingmar Bergman School of Nursing | Jun 25 2004

A man remembers the moment he fell in love with a woman he has long since lost. It happened less than a month after he met her, while they watched a video of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. The man adored Bergman and was surprised to learn that the woman had never seen any of his films. So he rented Persona and they watched it from his bed, their legs wrapped together under the covers.

Persona is about an actress who has inexplicably stopped talking. When the film begins, she’s in a psychiatric hospital where she’s being cared for by a young nurse. Her psychiatrist, seeing little progress in her condition, suggests that the actress and nurse vacation together at the psychiatrist’s beach house. There the drama unfolds.

In the man’s memory of this night, the woman made frequent comments about the film as they watched it, often laughing at her own sardonic observations. The man, annoyed—after all, this was Bergman—considered asking her to stop, but soon began to realize that her snickering remarks were funny. She was making fun of Bergman, and she was spot on. The turning point came when she started in on the psychiatrist, who as she pointed out, smoked continually. Every time you saw her, she was lighting another cigarette or lost behind a cloud of smoke. Somehow the man hadn’t noticed this.

“And what’s with this beach house?” she said. “Isn’t it a tad unorthodox for a psychiatrist to suggest that her mentally ill patient hang out alone with her nurse at the psychiatrist’s isolated beach house?”

Before the man could respond, the woman answered her own question.

“I guess this must be the Ingmar Bergman School of Nursing,” she said.

With this, the man looked at her. She was nestled against his side, her head resting on his chest, her arm wrapped across him. The room, his room then, was dark, and the light from the television flickered across her face.