Faces

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.