ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

GazerRise Fantastic!

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

bensonj James Quandt's strident narration of the "video essay" that accompanies the Criterion release of THE FACE OF ANOTHER complains about the reception the film received in the United States on its initial release. He quotes the critics of the time: "extravagantly chic," "arch," "abstruse," "hermetic," "slavishly symbolic," and "more grotesque than emotionally compelling." Stop right there! These critics knew what they were talking about.The film combines several hoary and not particularly profound narrative contrivances. Here's a man attempting to seduce his wife, pretending to be another person--this was old when THE GUARDSMAN first went on stage and has been done countless times. Then there's the classic mad scientist, presented with very little nuance, delving into Things that Man Was Not Meant to Know. Related to this is that the story is only able to exist by grossly underestimating man's ability to adapt to the unknown. (An example is the 1952 science fiction story "Mother" by Alfred Coppel in which astronauts all return insane when confronted with the vastness of space.) These primitive tropes are shamelessly built on a simple narrative situation that is completely unable to carry them: a man with a disfigured face getting facial reconstruction. This happens all the time, so what's to "not meant to know"? If all this isn't enough, Teshigahara tacks on an unrelated, completely separate set of characters in their own undeveloped narrative that even Quandt thinks doesn't work. The dialogue by author/screenwriter Kobo Abe is risible, sounding like something out of a grade-B forties horror film.To disguise the paucity of the film's narrative, Teshigahara has tricked it up with what Quandt admiringly calls "its arsenal of visual innovation: freeze-frames, defamiliarizing close-ups, wild zooms, wash-away wipes, X-rayed imagery, stuttered editing, surrealist tropes, swish pans, jump cuts, rear projection, montaged stills, edge framing, and canted, fragmented, and otherwise stylized compositions." These arty-farty gimmicks (and more) are, of course, hardly "innovations." They were endemic in the early sixties. Their extensive use seems a vain attempt to disguise the film's shallow content. Quandt also sees great significance in the many repetitions in the film: I see only repetition.But even that is not the film's worst problem. Teshigahara often seems like a still photographer lost in a form that requires narrative structure. His inability to develop a sustained narrative makes the film seem far longer than its already-long two hours plus. Things happen, but the film doesn't really progress. The end result is little more than a compendium of tricks and narrative scraps borrowed from others.

Felonious-Punk This is amazing cinema all the way through, in story, in sound editing, in cinematography, in acting, in lighting, and editing. The story is all about a lonesome disfigured man, and feels like it could have been written by Tennessee Williams or Ernest Hemingway. The direction was trippy and haunting in the way that Roger Corman movies are. It's like a precursor to "Abre los ojos"/"Vanilla Sky", but with a pace all its own, a more thoughtful, careful pace, that builds subtly. But just like those movies, this one also has no clear resolution. After all that arduous torture, we are left without any shining piece of truth, without any humor, but beyond that, we are not left even with any lasting issues to discuss or contemplate. We are only left with a sick, hopelessness. That's why I say, it's technically and dramatically alluring, but without payoff. I'm glad I watched it once though.Goes well with "Memento".

MartinHafer The film begins by showing a man with his face wrapped up with bandages--a lot like Claude Rains in THE INVISIBLE MAN. However, his face is wrapped because an industrial accident burned off his face and he is naturally severely depressed because of this. Later, he goes to a specialist who says he can make a lifelike mask that will help him look quite normal, but he also is apprehensive about how the mask will effect the man emotionally. To me, this made no sense and only betrayed that this doctor must have been given the script! After all, a guy has no face and yet the doctor is worried this may adversely affect his mind?! While this IS what happened ultimately, it was telegraphed way too easily and reduced the impact of what later occurs--which is NOT good.There is another parallel plot as well, but it isn't so well defined or easy to follow. A pretty woman has a bad burn on her face and although she seems a lot more confident and happy than the man without a face, she is miserable and lonely--so much so that she can't have a normal relationship with a man. Ultimately, she and her understanding brother have sex and she feels guilty and kills herself. Boy, talk about an upbeat message! Well, although this is a truly disgusting movie in some ways, I have got to hand it to those responsible for the film for making a very original film. In particular, the final scene with the crowd is amazing and well-conceived. While on some levels it resembles movies such as MAD LOVE, the film differs because it deals with topics that are generally considered taboo--such as incest and sexual assault. For this reason, this is DEFINITELY not a film you should let your kids see!! Additionally, while TECHNICALLLY well-made, this is an awfully repellent film--one I think most people would dislike intensely. If you have a strong stomach, then perhaps the film is for you.

MARIO GAUCI While the Japanese New Wave may not have been as well-known or as influential a movement as the French Nouvelle Vague, it yielded a mass of talented, independent and original film-makers spearheaded by Kaneto Shindo - of ONIBABA (1964) fame - and including Shohei Imamura, Yasuzo Masumura, Toshio Matsumoto, Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, Seijun Suzuki, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Koji Wakamatsu.Until now, like most film buffs, I had only known Hiroshi Teshigahara through his one undisputed international critical success, WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964), which had also made him the first ever Asian film-maker to be nominated for a Best Direction Academy Award. Even so, I have long cherished the thought of watching more of his admittedly small oeuvre (just 8 feature films in 40 years!) and now, thanks to the U.K.'s "Masters Of Cinema" DVD label, I caught up with the films Teshigahara made just before and after tasting international success.As a result of WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Teshigahara was here allowed to use for the first time in his career two of Japan's biggest box-office stars of the time, Tatsuya Nakadai, a fixture of the second half of Kurosawa's career and Machiko Kyo, star of RASHOMON (1950) and UGETSU (1953); the two stars from WOMAN IN THE DUNES, then - Eiji Okada and Kyoko Kishida - also appear in supporting roles. As with most of Teshigahara's films, Toru Takemitsu provides the impeccable musical accompaniment, suitably sinister and majestically lush as the occasion requires; Takemitsu also puts in an appearance in a lengthy bar sequence towards the middle of the film.The story, based as were Teshigahara's first four movies, on famed Japanese writer and friend Kobo Abe's novel, deals with a businessman who, after losing his facial features in an unspecified laboratory explosion, resorts to plastic surgery and gradually starts to question his identity. The fact that he specifically asks that his new face be molded from that of a complete stranger turns out to be a fateful one: it isn't enough to fool two perceptive females who cross his path - his own wife, whom he seduces under his new identity, shattering his new-found confidence by stating that she was aware of him being her husband all along and the crazed daughter of a hotel manager (the amiable Kurosawa regular Minoru Chiaki) to which he relocates after the surgery recognizes the new tenant as the heavily-bandaged one who had previously lived there; in fact, the arrival at the hotel of the man in his different identities is filmed the same way with the exact incidents occurring each time.The subject matter cannot but elicit comparisons with other films dealing with facial transplants and loss of identity and, in my case, I was instantly reminded of Georges Franju's EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959; one of my favorite films) and John Frankenheimer's SECONDS (1966). Although I'd say that both these films are even better at hitting their targets, Teshigahara's film is certainly worthy of such company and, in retrospect, what differentiates it from the others is its boldly cerebral take on the material, complete with shots of such utter strangeness that they remain effortlessly imprinted in one's mind: the very first shot of the laboratory full of inanimate limbs floating in vats of water, the introduction of the main character in a sequence shot in X-ray vision(!), the eerie, inexplicable shot of the laboratory seemingly engulfed by an over-sized bundle of hair floating in space, a supporting "fictional" character (more on this later) struck by a deadly ray of atomic radiation when he draws the curtains to look upon the scene of his sister's suicide and, perhaps best of all, the haunting night-time finale in which the main character and his doctor are surrounded by a horde of "faceless" people.It has to be said that THE FACE OF ANOTHER, as with a lot of post-war Japanese cinema, is informed by the traumatic WWII atomic bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The protagonist apparently goes to watch one such film at the cinema (an occurrence given away by a short but sudden change in aspect ratio from full-frame to widescreen): it deals with a facially-scarred young woman who, after having an apparently incestuous relationship with her brother, drowns herself. The story of that film is incongruously but seamlessly interspersed within the main narrative, serving as a parallel commentary on the increasingly ambivalent actions of the Tatsuya Nakadai character.One is hopeful for an English-subtitled DVD release of Hiroshi Teshigahara's fourth and last collaboration with Kobo Abe, THE MAN WITHOUT A MAP (1968), somewhere down the line...