JustAManWithoutFace

The movie appeared randomly on Netflix and I liked the synopsis. After checking that on imdb had a relatively low score, almost skipped the movie. I'm glad I did not!

The movie is actually pretty good, it has an engadgin dark tone and really never gets boring. It has action, lovely landscapes and scenes with really good dialogue, and pretty remarkable action scenes.

The movie could look face to face the most popular korean thrillers without any shame, so honestly, I can't understand the relatively low score the movie got here...

'Persona' is an anthology of four histories dealing with love, revenge and death. These are stand-alone episodes and they deserve to be rated in that way. But now I'm judging the product ('Persona') as one entire piece.

I would not like to call any form of art as a waste of time, but 'Persona' began like this to me. 'Love set' was not anything else than a 15-minute tennis match despite the good acting and the image composition. I almost stop watching the following chapters.

Fortunately, I continued. The three following histories are well scripted, well portrayed. And they are not superficial like the first one. 'Kiss burn' is fun, but also inspiring. You learn there are other elements than revenge to realize yourself. Especially when you are a teen and you are generally angry.

Even though, I would like to focus on chapters 2 and 4 ('Collector' and 'Walking at night'). These are good pieces of film art. They concern deep personal feelings, and, as a viewer, they are able to set you in a mood of tension or give you an embrace of warm sadness.

The storytelling of these two chapters is deliberately unspecific. That aspect joined to the fact of the concrete recurrent obsessions or fears of the characters, it makes you think that these two histories could perfectly have been extracted by one of the Japanese Haruki Murakami's anthologies of short stories.

I give to 'Persona' a rating of 7. It could have been higher if they had got rid of 'Love Match'. I think this is a huge mistake of the producers. But, apart from this fact, I was able to enjoy the remaining part. Especially 'Walking at Night'.

Japanese storytelling is characteristic to be downtempo. There are no big plot twists on it. Instead, they focus on concrete feelings or fears and they develop them. This series is not the exception. But the way in which it is told and how the story grows with the main character, Wako, is really engaging. Wako is a woman on her thirties that is concerned about marriage, having a child and having a job. She's in a solid ground but that doesn't make her happy. She wants to turn around her life but she fears to lose all and never get to that situation again. That's because she's getting older and, in the context of the Japanese society, it's every time more difficult to fulfil those goals from scratch. When she feels surpassed, founds a way to escape from that difficult reality, which to society's standard point of view can result disgusting. In fact, these ignominious situations are really well portraited on the series, being sometimes difficult to keep watching since you are observing the moral decadence of a woman, but in the other hand, it's overwhelming to see her neverending pursuit of happiness.