Persona

I watched half an hour of Ingmar Bergman's film "Persona" but couldn't take any more. Two women, one of whom does not say a word, the other who can't stop, meet in a hospital - one is a patient, the other a nurse. And they talk. Or, rather, the one talks. About her experiences with a lover who may become her husband. May because she has had an experience of another kind of love (or lust) on a beach with a couple of boys. Yes, boys. Not as in film notes about the film "young men"; no, she specifically says "boys". I thought this bordered on the unmentionable subject of peodophilia or, if not that quite, pornography.
Of course, they're partial to a bit of porn in art houses and film societies ( I once saw Hedy Lamarr naked in "Extase", needless to say in a film society). But you're not supposed to enjoy it, you're supposed to ponder it in the context of the story..... or something.
The thing is "Persona" is a rotten film. Yet it got five stars in The Radio Times and rave reviews in Rotten Tomatoes and David Thompson rates it highly, so does Pauline Kael if memory serves me right. So it must be me. I hated it from beginning to .... to half an hour into it.
Now I enjoyed Clint Eastward's "Mystic River" whioch I also saw recently (for the second time) and thought it a much better film: good story, terrifying in places, good dialogue, good acting.
If I were to say that in the film society I once joined I would have been shouted down - "moron", "Phillistine". You couldn't mention Eastwood in the same breath as Bergman; it would have been like comparing Old Mother Riley with Laurence Olivier.
Yesterday I went to see another film whose title begins with the same letter as "Persona". I am referring to "Predators". I enjoyed it. Mindless I suppose but you need something mindless after an Ingmar Bergman film. Something where characters move about and shoot things and swear and.... well, don't just talk, talk, talk.