Faces

When I began watching Faces, I realized that I never knew just when the present scene was going to end. I then realized that I wished that it would last forever. I found myself so engrossed in the scene that I was fascinated with it by itself. Then the next scene began, and the next scene, and within each one, there is a whole single movie with characters and a story arch. Faces is a film that does not allow any given scene to simply be a communication of plot information. Cassavetes created an entire universe for his actors in every scene. Each scene is a million years of passion spliced together, each demonstrating brazenly his brilliant recognition of human exchange and in conversation and conflict what is exchanged and what is left to be desired.

The film has moments of great pain because miniature struggles are so real and they tend to be vocalizations of a person's deeper fears in social interactions and in the structure of life. The film has scenes of furious drama because characters will experience blind unleashing of their ids as middle-aged people. Faces also delivers highly during moments of happiness and fun because, the situation's comfort level gracefully allowing, the characters will show the fieriest, grandiose, extroverted parts of themselves.

The movie's message, ironically, is not about the inner self and the unleashing of it but about the naiveté with which people carry out their normal married lives and don't care to face their flaws and problems and, though they gradually strip their personalities down bare throughout interactions, they continue not knowing themselves or each other. Faces is now among my favorite films of all time and places John Cassavetes on a pedestal as an idol of mine. The movie is a supreme demonstration of powerhouse acting, wherein each performance can be cherished by the performer with a feeling of ownership. There is a bit of real actor in each character played, and that can be seen in each and every powerhouse scene in a row.

So this is the work of John Cassavetes? Pretty good, I must say. I definitely can appreciate good conversations and witty dialogue any day.

This film, I would say is another one of those indie films (sort of foreign-filmmaking- esque) from how it is much ado about NOTHING. I love these films. They are like a breath of fresh air. That, and they always seem so personal. I wonder if it was actually scripted or if it was improvised like most Cassavetes projects.

The only work I have seen of Mr. John Cassavetes was his depute film, Shadows, which was mainly all improve, or so he says in his interviews. I take a strong liking to these films because of how slow they are, yet SO INVITING; so UN-American, if you will. - People have said that Cassavetes brought the indie film movement to the states. So far I have not been proved wrong so far. His films, such as Faces, are all so unique and timeless. Like literally, I believe this movie will be studied until THE END OF TIME.

I like seeing people celebrating. It is nice. Gives one the feeling of calmness; like nothing extreme is happening so we don't have to waste any time stressing about it. Does that make sense?

Our main protagonist, Richard Forst (played by John Marley), is a (so called) businessman who has an affair with a much younger woman. Little does he know that his wife has some plans of her own.. You can really tell what kind of man Robert is when he says:

"I'm just a mild success in a dull profession, and I want to start over again. And I've got a bad kidney!"

This just shows what kind of person he is as he says it to the younger girl, Jeannie (played by the beautiful Gene Rowlands).

I really like the acting and love the struggles and conflict that this husband and wife go through. Both are trying to find happiness in so many ways, but is only making it worse for themselves. .

-- Michael Mendez

I'm sorry. I can't quite say I LIKED this movie. But, if nothing else, I... appreciated it. NO ONE can accuse Cassavetes of being unoriginal in any aspect of the production. Every frame of the film is remarkably unconventional. And furthermore, the performances were so starkly real it makes the prospect that there even WAS a script seem impossible to me. Now, I don't know any back story about this movie, but I'm sure there had to have been some script involved somewhere. What I'm saying is that the way the actors played it, the lines seemed... unwriteable. It's as if we were watching a documentary, but one where we can be certain those involved didn't know they were being filmed.

Basically, except for the poor dubbing that makes literally MOST of the dialogue in the film incomprehensible, I can't say there's anything about any individual sequences in the film that I disliked. HOWEVER, what I did have a problem with is this: the vanguard style of filmmaking, the characters, the situations they are in, the dialogue (if you want to call it that): does it all really come together to SAY anything? I didn't come away with any kind of an interesting or coherent message from the film. Which is fine if the scenes flow nicely together, but they really don't. Each scene as an entity unto itself is wonderful, but their juxtaposition together gets especially tiresome. I mean, for roughly 80% of the film, ALL of the characters onscreen are inebriated. Now, this makes it extremely difficult to get to know the characters beyond their buffoonish drunken altar egoes. Maybe, that was the point. I don't know. What I do know is that Cassavetes stubbornly refuses to reveal to us anything that even approximately resembles, plot, forward motion, or even... any kind of... an event... a happening until the last twenty minutes of the film when some interesting stuff finally happens. And this definitely alienates most audiences. Do you want to know why this movie has such a high rating? Because the people that didn't like it left after twenty-forty minutes. I know in the theater that I saw it in (a student film organization that watches intellectually stimulating independent fare weekly with warm response), the crowd of twenty people had been reduced by the end of the film to me, the president of the club (who was reading), and one other guy (whom I have a suspicion, fell asleep during at least part of the film) in the theater. EVERYBODY else got frustrated. Draw your own conclusions.

I see movies hoping that they're different. I've seen so many films that were exactly the same and that's really just a waste of time. Well, Faces is certainly different. It's hard to get through. It actually took me a week. That's because there is little action and it is hard to get interested in it. The reason why it's so original is because it is practcially a documentary on social life in this time period. It's as low budget as you get. Characters just hang around houses drinking and enjoying themselves. So I guess there isn't much of a plot, but on the good side this might be the most realistic movie I've ever seen. I really felt like nothing was unrealistic, not even a single one of the conversations. That's different. Most movies try to impress, but Faces tries to be natural. That doesn't make much sense because "natural" means you're not trying to do anything, you're just existing as you always do. Maybe that was how Faces was filmed. It definately feels natural and that's a big achievment.

This movie is the epitome of brilliantly dramatic character study: It's so phenomenal, watching it is excruciating. Cassavetes takes us deep inside the lives of a bored, shallow upper-middle-class couple, and as his skilled actors improvise remarkably realistic scenes, down to the smallest mannerism of their characters, Cassavetes forces us to watch every knife-twisting second. It's difficult: Rather than watching an unpleasant situation, then getting pulled away by an editor's cut, we have to sit through all 20 or 25 minutes of a scene that makes us squirm, whether it's a middle-aged man making an ass of himself to impress a young prostitute or his wife feigning laughter to make a young man think she's having fun with him. While not the best movie I've ever seen, it's unique: A great work to whose style nothing else compares.