Faces<\/em> was originally written as a play, and Cassavetes\u2019 two-act structure remains visible in the film\u2019s final form. The movie doesn\u2019t break the rules of conventional studio filmmaking so much as it ignores them altogether, dropping the viewer into a long night\u2019s journey into day with an upper middle-class suburban couple navigating the last gasps of their miserable marriage. There\u2019s no frame around the proceedings, nor any character introductions for the sake of the audience. We\u2019re thrown into the action via a herky-jerky, 16mm handheld camera bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter around the performers in black-and-white. Amorphous scenes stretch out for what feels like forever, following the characters\u2019 rapid mood swings from boisterous, back-slapping gregariousness to chillingly sudden spurts of hostility. The destabilizing effect is electrifying. No matter how many times I may have seen them before, watching a Cassavetes movie is always such a volatile emotional experience that for a few days afterward other films feel anemic to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even more radical than Faces<\/em>\u2019 aesthetic approach was its means of production — a more expensive extension of what the director had done with his 1958 debut Shadows<\/em>, shooting without studio support with a skeleton crew of friends and family on nights and weekends at the homes of the filmmaker and his mother-in-law. As would later become his M.O., Cassavetes and wife Gena Rowlands funneled the paychecks from their considerable acting careers into funding a dream Hollywood accountants said couldn\u2019t be accomplished. (One told him, \u201cYou can\u2019t build a rocket ship to the moon in your garage.\u201d) An artist who had fought the system and lost finally achieved true independence \u2013 eventually branching out into distributing his films himself \u2013 although the oft-broke Cassavetes admitted that this process required \u201ca profound disrespect for money,\u201d as well as his exceptional gift for hustling. At one point during the production of Faces<\/em>, he couldn\u2019t afford to pay the milkman\u2019s bill so he traded him a percentage point in the picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Faces<\/em> follows the unhappy infidelities of a successful businessman (veteran actor John Marley) and his wife (first-timer Lynn Carlin) who on the surface would seem to have it all, yet stew in solitary dissatisfactions and a mutual failure to meaningfully communicate. He falls hard for a working girl played by Rowlands, her natural patrician air marred by smudgy makeup and a boozy slur, while his wife spends a self-destructive night with a younger beach bum type (crew member and constant Cassavetes collaborator Seymour Cassel) that ends in disaster. It\u2019s an incredibly sympathetic movie about an older generation bumping up against the new freedoms of the 1960s, jolted out of the consumer comforts that used to keep them from facing the fundamental emptiness of their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shot over six weeks in 1965, the film spent the following three years in a tumultuous post-production period financed by Cassavetes\u2019 resurgent film acting career in The Dirty Dozen<\/em> and Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em>. His first cut came in at eight hours, Cassavetes having shot so much footage it was strewn in piles across his family\u2019s homes. One sequence was destroyed after his mother-in-law\u2019s dog defecated on it. \u201cEveryone\u2019s a film critic,\u201d Cassavetes sighed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At this particular cultural moment, it wasn\u2019t exactly hip to make a movie about the plight of well-off suburbanites, a sentiment reflected in some of the more unkind reviews. (This trend continues in criticism today, picking and choosing people worthy of our compassion, a la<\/em> the \u201csad white people movie\u201d dismissals of films like Manchester By the Sea.<\/em>) A year after The Graduate,<\/em> here was a film that felt sorry for Ben and Elaine\u2019s despised parents. But such was Cassavetes\u2019 overwhelming empathy for his characters, one night on set he improvised a piano serenade confessing how he\u2019d written them each to represent a different aspect of himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And they\u2019re not particularly flattering aspects, either. So much of the booze-addled carrying on in Faces<\/em> is foolhardy, masculine peacocking \u2013 every conversation between men in the movie is a competition, jockeying either for position or the attentions of a woman they don\u2019t even respect to begin with. It\u2019s a film full of phony, bellowing laughter and exaggerated social pieties that shatter whenever a moment of truth shockingly punches its way through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is this need to prove \u2013 the bustling, bravura ego \u2013 that fatally wounds the people of the picture,\u201d Cassavetes wrote in the introduction to the film\u2019s published screenplay in 1970. \u201cSociety must chuck its petty prejudices and false idols and if necessary start again from a new beginning where men as well as women can be kinder to themselves.\u201d We\u2019re still not there yet. “Faces” is currently streaming on HBO Max<\/a> and the Criterion Channel<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Cassavetes\u2019 scorching 1968 drama of marital misery has lost none of its considerable power after decades of imitation and influence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":633,"featured_media":18508,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-18506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/633"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21941,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18506\/revisions\/21941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/faces-1024x576.jpg\")
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