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FACES
From John Cassavetes: Five Films

Review by Ed Nguyen

Stars: Lynn Carlin, John Marley, Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel
Director: John Cassavetes
Audio: English monaural
Subtitles: English
Video: Black & white, widescreen 1.66:1
Studio: Criterion
Features: Alternate opening sequence, Cinéastes de notre temps episode, Making Faces documentary, Lighting & Shooting the Film
Length: 130 minutes
Release Date: September 21, 2004

"I am myself.  Who else would I be?"

Film *** ½

Following the success of his debut film Shadows, John Cassavetes was offered a big studio contract.  Unfortunately, this led to an unhappy period during which the director created only two mediocre films - Too Late Blues and A Child is Waiting.  Disgusted with his Hollywood experience, Cassavetes opted to return to the iconoclastic, improvisational style that had been so successful with Shadows.  By 1965, feeling that the stage offered actors the greatest degree of freedom for creative expression, Cassavetes wrote a stage play exploring friendships and mutual dissatisfaction.  Eventually, he adapted this play into a film - Faces.

Today, Faces is considered a landmark achievement in American cinema, not only for its influence on future independent filmmakers but also for its anti-Hollywood stylizations.  Most Hollywood films concern themselves with big or unusual events (therein, after all, lies the meat of any action-driven story).  Cassavetes, however, was more interested in exploring the ordinary flaws and pockmarks of everyday life, mundane things which are so often ignored in the typical Hollywood production.

Faces embodies much of what Cassavetes felt was vital to the stage and missing from cinema.  In a break from the Hollywood convention, the film utilizes numerous hand-held camera shots with drifting focus, protracted scenes, and seemingly amorphous dialogue that nevertheless feels real, unforced, and unscripted.  The men and women of Faces' ensemble cast are a reflection of true middle-class America suburbia, and each character has his or her own personal flaws and problems.  We are introduced early on in the film to two such people, Richard and Freddie.  They are old college chums, now married and middle-aged.  In a drunken revelry one evening, they pick up Jeannie, presumably a prostitute, and for the next thirteen random minutes of film time, they cajole merrily and behave in an uninhibited fashion.  This entire sequence is essentially plot-less, drifting through a myriad of poor jokes, old college gags, and impromptu singing and dancing.  A jealous fit over Jeannie’s divided affections between the men eventually halts the merrymaking, and the evening ends poorly as the two friends somberly go their separate ways.

However, this encounter serves as a catalyst for Richard's emerging dissatisfaction.  Richard (John Marley), in the midst of a developing mid-life crisis, yearns for an escape from the pressures and monotony of business and married life.  He will eventually seek out Jeannie (Gena Rowlands) once more, rejecting his own young and devoted wife Maria (Lynn Carlin) in the process.  It is a selfish act, one that drives the previously faithful Maria to search for a release from her own inhibitions as well.  This leads to absolutely electric, dialogue-free nightclub scene as Maria goes out on the town with her girlfriends and encounters a dashing, young player (Seymour Cassel).  The next morning consequences of these extramarital trysts signal the alienation and increasing emptiness of the marriage between Richard and Maria.

Faces is about our outwardly personas and the dangers or dilemmas which arise when we strip away such disguises.  It suggests that all our external personas are pretenses, merely social performances which mask our deeper, hidden insecurities or vulnerabilities.  As with many of Cassavetes' film, Faces is a film about adult relationships and communication, or lack thereof.  The depth of his films, as they pertain to the complex and often ambivalent emotions of adults, generally precludes children viewers from truly comprehending these emotions; such appreciation can only be acquired through maturity and sometimes painful experience.  Among all of Cassavetes' movies, this is probably most true of Faces.

The multiple characters of Faces initially appear at ease and relaxed.  And yet, these personalities are so labile, going from anger to merriment in a span of mere seconds, that one wonders how honest they truly are to themselves.  Are these people as they seem or merely facades, with public faces masking actual emotions?  Faces thus raises this notion of everyday life as theater.

In many scenes, the dialogue and scenes flow with a rhythm like the cadences and tempo switches of a jazz jam session.  Characters burst into laughter or jokes spontaneously, and the “plot” unfolds in an unpredictable, stream-of-consciousness manner.  The actors themselves often seem to be beyond performance in Faces; rather, they simply are these characters to the point where Faces seems like a candid documentary, not a fictional film.  Consequently, the film frequently feels voyeuristic.  Its characters chuckle or cry about their personal jokes or crises; sometimes the references make sense, other times they don't, as though the characters were sharing a secret joke of which only they, and not necessarily the audience, are aware.

For instance, Richard and Maria in a happier moment share laughter and playful petting in bed.  This scene is re-iterated later between Richard and Jeannie.  Both scenes end soberly when reality is allowed to set in.  Maria tells Richard after a while that his jokes are not so funny after all, and the previous light-heartedness descends into quiet solitude; in the later scene, Richard asks Jeannie to “just be yourself,” which produces an uncomfortable silence that is only broken once Richard assumes his joking demeanor.

The characters in Faces, much like in real life, are afraid of revealing their true selves.  To do so is to become vulnerable, to leave oneself defenseless.  The superficiality of laughter and gaiety mask the true feelings for these characters.  More significantly, such barriers are the ultimate reason for the breakdown of communications between these characters.  Everyone is so busy pretending to be merry and carefree that no one has the time to truly understand or listen to one another.  Any moment of truth which arises is quickly subdued, either by the resumption of laughter or the breaking up of the party as each character goes his or her separate way.

Faces concludes on much the same note as many of its encounters do, in silence.  The married couple Richard and Maria sit on opposite ends of a staircase, unable to express themselves in light of the exposed nature of their true feelings.  Without the protective armor of gaiety and laughter, Richard and Maria have nothing to say to one another.  As the film suggests, we all in turn wear our own unique faces, and perhaps social life is, in essence, nothing more than a theater of and for the masses.

Faces was completed and released in 1968.  At the Venice Film Festival, the film won Best Actor (John Marley), Best Director, Best Foreign Film, and the Jury Award for Best Picture.  In its American distribution, it was hailed as a ground-breaking film, eventually receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Actress (Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin) and Best Screenplay.

The success of Faces was a vindication of John Cassavetes' vision for film as something more meaningful than simply a way to make a buck.  This personal style of filmmaking marked Cassavetes' triumphant return to independent cinema.  After several fruitless years in the Hollywood studio system, Cassavetes had returned to his element with Faces, one of the most influential films of the 1960's and certainly a forebear to the character-driven American cinema of the 1970's.

BONUS TRIVIA:  If John Marley looks familiar, that is because he played a producer who received an offer he couldn't refuse in The Godfather!

Video ** ½

This transfer of Faces was made from a 35mm dupe negative created off of the original 16mm negative.  The general graininess and mildly softness of the image are a remnant of this blow-up process.  Otherwise, the film looks quite good, with only a slight speckling of dust.  The camerawork has a handheld, loose feel to it that further enhances the film's documentary feel, with protracted sequences which play out in real-time.  Contrast levels are excellent, as is the amount of detail in the frame.  Overall, Faces looks fairly decent for a black & white, 16mm film.

Audio **

The audio in Faces is a little scratchy and occasionally shrill.  Speech is a bit fuzzy at times, and with the overlapping, improvisational nature of the dialogue, can be difficult to hear clearly.  To complicate matters, sound synching was flawed due to an error during filming (this problem is detailed by Al Ruban in one of the disc’s documentaries), so lip movement does not always match the sound.  Clearly, the original film's rudimentary sound recording technique makes for a less-than-optimal audio experience, but oddly enough this contributes to the film’s spontaneous, true-life feel.

Features ****

"Nobody has the time to be vulnerable to each other."

Faces is a double-DVD set.  The first disc contains the film, whereas the second disc holds all the supplemental features.

Of interest will be the alternate opening sequence (17 min.).  Lifted from an early edit of the film, it includes a few additional scenes as well as a re-shuffling of certain scenes from the film.

There are three documentaries on the disc.  The first, Cinéastes de notre temp (48 min.), contains two episodes of the long-running French television show devoted to important cinema.  The first segment (23 min.) shows rare 1965 archival footage of Cassavetes humorously discussing his personal interests, his experience in Hollywood, and his film currently in production, Faces.  The second segment (25 min.) has an interview from 1968 with Cassavetes discussing his film theory, his early film Shadows, and his now-finished film Faces. This documentary is presented entirely in English, so no subtitles are required.

Making Faces (42 min.) is a new documentary featuring interviews with Lynn Carlin, Seymour Cassel, Gena Rowlands, and director of photography Al Ruban.  All of them discuss their roles in the film and Cassavetes’ unorthodox approach to filmmaking.  Most interestingly, Rowlands describes how she was pregnant during filming and had elected to play Jeannie as opposed to Maria (a more physically demanding role); ironically, Lynn Carlin turned out to be secretly pregnant, too!

Ruban returns as narrator in In Lighting & Shooting the Film to discuss in rather technical language how certain scenes were lit and photographed.  There are a few pages of introduction, followed by several pages detailing the equipment and film stock.  Then, there follows actual film footage (11 min.) accompanied by subtitled explanations of the photography.  The information provided in this featurette is probably beyond the appreciation of most viewers but should be of interest to those with a background in photography or film technique.  At the end, Ruban briefly discusses the film’s open-ended conclusion.

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