It’s taken me quite a few years to realize that this, above all others, is my favorite Cassavetes film. Shadows is exhilirating and touching all at once, and my band in college was named after the oily emcee in the brilliant The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (we were awesome, by the way), but Faces so perfectly comprises all of Cassavetes’ most empathetic insights into men and women and the difficulties they have with each other.
In many ways, Cassavetes’ protagonists, the Forsts, are more upstanding and restrained in comparison to the blustering, shameless friends and colleagues that surround them, but they are far from restrained. Richard, the volcanic, self-composed businessman, missing the tenderness he has lost at home, seeks it out in the arms of Jeannie, a prostitute; and Maria, his prudish and pursed-lipped housewife, retaliates first with a night on the town with the girls and then with a night in bed with a hippie Seymour Cassel. If this set-up seems to reify the rather stale truism that all marital problems stem from the husband’s wanting to have sex and the wife’s having a headache, the film nonetheless manages to avoid (or at least deepen) this clichÈ in the impossibly sensitive combination of its cinematography and performances: the affectionate glances shared between Jeannie and Richard, suggesting the unlikely, but still deep and genuine connection that each is grasping for; and the tragicomic one-night stand between Chet and Maria, which begins as an act of desperation and ends as a crucial moment of self-realization.
To a great extent, Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence also individually achieve this profound dissection of marriage, but one can’t really watch those films without feeling slightly pummelled. The physical effects ofFaces are slightly more muted, and therefore slightly more enjoyable, tending more toward resignation than exasperation. Exhausted from 130 minutes of near-suicidal marital warfare, the Forsts sit on the staircase of their home and have a quiet cigarette. Like them, the spectator is finally rewarded with a little clarity and a chance to breathe.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
07 Aug 2007 2:13 PM | Submit Comment
