REVIEW: Persona
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Re-watch value: 3 out of 5 stars
Synopsis
*From Netflix*
An exploration of different personas in an eclectic collection of four works by critically acclaimed Korean directors.
Rambling
*beware of spoilers*
This is not K-drama. I repeat. This is not K-drama. Persona is a short film series “collection.” Produced by Netflix, the collection consists of four episodes—an anthology, meaning the episodes are unrelated to each other. They are four distinct stories, with their own characters and even aesthetics.
My thoughts overall? It was unique and well-produced and careful. The entire thing seemed intentional, and the intention was to make you think, make you feel something. It reminded me of that movie Tale of Tales (2015) or Paris, je t'aime (2006). IU was the perfect vehicle for this, and I thought she did so remarkably well as an actress. I hope she gets to flex her acting chops more.
Did I like it? Some episodes, yes. Other episodes, no. Some moments, yes. Some sequences, no. I felt it’d be more appropriate to dissect each episode on its own. So here goes… Buckle up. It’s a long one.
1 – Love Set
IU has some serious (tennis) game. In this episode, she plays third wheel to her father and his girlfriend’s tennis day. When the orgasmic grunts from the both of them become too much to handle, she calls up a boy toy to try to seduce the girlfriend. BTW, her dad’s new girlfriend is her English teacher and probably closer to IU’s age.
The white dude shows up and is completely useless. If I ever saw a character as equally important as wallpaper, this guy would be it. While cleaning up the ridiculous number of tennis balls on the court, IU jumps on her dad’s back (well, this might have roots in K-drama after all…) and begs him not to marry her. Sidenote: He looks ridiculously young—so young that he can’t possibly have a grown-up daughter like IU.
The girlfriend, Doona, proposes her and IU have a match. And when her father isn’t paying attention, Doona ups the ante: If I win, you break it off with your father. If you win, I break it off with your father.
The proceeding match is a quick-cut montage of them playing tennis, which became painful after a while. Glamor shots of their bodies. Slow-motion just to drive home how sweaty and tired and motivated each of them is. It was such a long sequence. Too long. Also, IU says “fuck” a bunch of times. The scoreboard and the characters referred to IU by her stage name IU. Is IU playing a version of herself? Bae-Doona is also the girlfriend’s name in real life…
In the end, IU is defeated, having won zero games. In her weakest moment—knee scraped and bleeding all over her leg, out of breath and on the floor—she begs Doona not to marry her dad. Doona hands her a tennis ball meaningfully and says, “I won’t marry your dad.” She walks back to her starting position as IU whispers, “Thank you.” Did Doona ever have intentions of marrying IU’s dad? Was she just having a little fun at IU’s expense? Did Doona propose the bet knowing IU would fail miserably? I think so. Did Doona execute her backward plan just to bring the arrogant and petulant IU down a peg? I think so. A showy way to demonstrate how she has more power in this dynamic than the father-daughter relationship? Yeah, for sure.
The episode title has double meaning. A “Love Set” meaning a set of games where IU didn’t make a single point. Love = 0 points, in tennis terminology. On the other hand, the girls were playing for keeps, so it really was a “Battle for Love” Set.
2 – Collector
We enter in on this desperate, uptight man (so uptight that he’s buttoned the top button on his polo) talking with a much younger IU. He asks where she’s been, why she didn’t contact him. Apparently, IU has been MIA for two weeks. She asks him upfront if he wanted what would make him feel comforted or if he wanted the truth. Truth, he says. The truth is that she went to some island to surf and do yoga with two foreign male friends. She said she initially left to go get something, whatever that is she never says. He is restraining all of his reactions to her words. The news hits him like a ton of bricks, or should I say, a killer blow? We cut to a physical representation of his subconscious being morbidly decapitated in a stark white room. As IU continues nonchalantly recounting her adventures (at his behest, mind you), it’s an epiphany moment for him as he’s realizing the relationship is one-sided. We cut to his white-roomed internal struggle, his doubts manifest as his ex-fiancée, whom he left to be with IU.
IU gives him a little gift she brought back from her travels. He rushes to open the elaborately painted box, but she lays her hand on his, saying to please open it once she’s gone. “I promise you’ll never forget this day,” she smiles.
He literally puts himself back together in the white room when IU, feigning interest, listens to him ramble about how much he loves and honors women, that he’s known women are better than men for some time now, etc. The entire time she is visibly bored, paying more attention to her phone than to him.
When IU goes for an extended bathroom break, he investigates and finds her chatting intimately with a young man. They kiss passionately, and Polo Man tries to get to the bottom of it, but the younger dude is just someone she simply dismisses as a “friend.”
She continues with her visit, and goes on to thoughtfully ponder what she wants. She wants to be free, she wants to be eternal. Earlier she had talked about the Hindu god Shiva, the patron god of yoga and meditation, and that if you master yoga, you are somehow able to breathe underwater? We see a submerged IU in dark, navy water swimming slowly, almost like a mermaid. Meanwhile, his subconscious self is trying desperately to do a yoga pose. Sweating and trying over and over to seemingly fit her. Please her. Mold himself to her interests and lifestyle.
Once she’s had enough of her boredom, literally saying so, she goes to leave. He begs her to stay. She stays only once he assures her it’s not because he wants to sleep with her. He confronts her about her behavior, confirms that they’re dating (“in a way,” she vaguely says), and wants to know what he “means” to her. She nearly rolls her eyes, annoyed that he isn’t “cool,” that he couldn’t grasp the fluidity of their arrangement. She tears him down by saying she stayed talking with him all day only because she felt bad, felt pity for him essentially. But make no mistake—who she sees, when she comes, where she goes, who she talks to, etc. is at her exclusive discretion. She has no legal obligations toward him. Defeated, he says “But I love you.” She challenges him, does he even know what love is? and basically says that people say they love her but got nothing to show for it. If he means it, then prove it. “Take out your heart and show it to me” she demands as she pounds her finger on the table. And here’s where shit got crazy.
The whites of her eyes turn yellow and blue. He unbuttons all the buttons on his polo. He reaches in his shirt, and they cut to IU, who suddenly looks… turned on? Hungry? She licks her lips in anticipation. Amid some gnarly cracking, slurping, and wrenching noises, he rips out his bloody heart and offers it to her still beating.
She takes it in her hands, holding it gingerly and looking at it... some type of way? My questions ceased once she turned to him and said, “I’ll salt it properly so it won’t rot for a very long time.” With that, she pops open a jar, sticks his heart in it, seals it, and then sticks it in her red bag (of course it’s red), which apparently contains more hearts she’s *collected*
But first, “What was your name again?” She writes his name on the jar just as if she was writing “coffee,” “salt,” or “sugar.” She rises and happily approaches the anemic, weak-looking dude, whispers something in his ear, and walks off. Bizarrely, there’s a portrait of her painted on the wall of the restaurant or basement bar where they were sitting? He finally opens the box she gave him...
And it’s his subconscious. The tiny room where he’s been fighting with himself and at times his ex-fiancée. He’s been trapped by her all along. She already had his mind, but now she just needed his heart. IU’s voiceover echoes her whispered words: “I told you you’d never forget this day. I love you. I’m leaving.”
I wish I could definitively say what the fuck happened in this episode, but I’ll give my interpretation: IU was a supernatural man-eater—possibly even an evil mermaid. Mermaids aren’t just singing romantics (although IU has the voice of an angel, so…), mermaids are often depicted as carnivorous, wild seductresses of the ocean, luring thirsty sailors to their death in the depths. The beginning shot of the episode is of her doing yoga in what appears to be an empty pool, and later when she recounts surfing, she talks about giving herself over to the waves, dissolving into the water like sugar dissolves in tea. Not to mention the sequences of her, eyes closed, under the deep blue sea…
I did get some major 500 Days of Summer vibes. Who is at fault here? Is it IU, who never clearly indicated what she wanted from Polo Man or expressed true feelings of love? Or is it Polo Man, who ended his engagement because he saw something in the wild, carefree IU? He definitely projected his feelings onto her and thought way more of their relationship than he should have.
3 – Kiss Fire
No chickens were burned in the making of this episode.
I would say “Kiss Fire” was the least remarkable and most forgettable of all the episodes. The girls mention a gender disparity, where the guy her BFF made-out with on the beach could show up to school and not be considered a slut covered in hickeys, while the BFF has to stay home until the evidence of their tryst disappears. But other than that? Nothing much here. In trying to exact revenge on the BFF’s drunkard father (he bizarrely cut the BFF’s hair while she was sleeping), they inadvertently start a forest fire. The irony is that the BFF’s drunkard (probably abusive) father is a forest fire lookout. I didn’t even know that was a thing…
The craziest part was IU smoking cigarettes??
4 – Walking at Night
Black and white. A couple walking alone at night. I thought we were doing some sort of Temperature of Love bit, but the twist is revealed rather early.
IU tells this morbid story of her older sister dying with her mouth open. Her guy asks why she’s telling such a macabre story, and she says, “Because I died.”
He stutters as the memory comes back in spurts. He suddenly is overwhelmed with emotions and begins to wail, crouched down by a stone wall. IU gets him to stop crying, and here’s the second twist: They’re in his dream.
In them walking and talking, we find out that she committed suicide and, despite her saying that when he wakes he won’t remember a thing, she wanted him to know that it wasn’t his fault. It was poignant, moving, a quiet sort of revelation.
When he asks her why she died, she says that she was lonely. He starts crying as he asks if he made her lonely. No, she says, he was there for her. I thought it was interesting how she makes a point of saying she “jumped from so high” and didn’t die on impact. But she couldn’t remember if she died with her mouth open or closed. She didn’t want to die trying to gasp for air and cling to life pathetically like her sister did. But sometimes you don’t get to choose.
I adored the black and white. How they were visiting places they’d been together in life. How all the other people in the dream were frozen. It was magical. A magical dreamland. The music was simple strings, an acoustic guitar.
“We are here but no one will remember us,” says IU. “Nothing remains but the night.”
I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness–more so than any episode of 13 Reasons Why. I almost cried. Putting myself in his shoes, I felt the urge to just linger in the moment, just wanting so badly to remember, but knowing I’ll inevitably forget the entire encounter. Forget the last night they had together. But dreams have to end.
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Did you watch Persona? What was your favorite episode? Tell me in the comments below!
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