Hiroshi Teshigahara is one of the great surreal directors. He uses bizarre symbol-motivated imagery with such confidence that he lifts the viewer out of the art-house and projects him into a dream. By accepting what might normally be heavy-handedness as a precept of his form, he opens a whole genre for exploration.
Though is often overshadowed by his more famous work, Woman in the Dunes, it stands as a complex and intriguing work on its own. The visuals are striking even when common, and this movie even more directly than Woman questions and challenges modern notions of identity.
Tatsuya Nakadai Receives Proto-Plastic Surgery
Face of Another is about a man whose face has burned off. The first half of the movie is full of images of him covered in bandages that make him look like the invisible man. It’s the commonness of this blank face that makes the image so remarkable.
Documentary-style footage of him walking down the street in crowds hammer home his isolation. He doesn’t exist in a fantasy world where social rules allow for people wrapped in bandages to interact normally. He lives in a world very much like the real one, and though he is glaringly obvious no one will look at him.
That is a dilemma. His overbearing self-consciousness has crystallized into bitterness by the time the movie begins. He hates most people but also yearns to reintegrate into society. To this end he hires a doctor to make a mask for him. The two go out and find someone who is willing to have a plaster made of his face, and from that they fashion something to go over the protagonist’s face.
At first he goes around enjoying his ability to both blend in and attract attention as he pleases. He is a normal man. Eventually, however, his bitterness wells back up and he forms a plan: to seduce his wife using the new face and identity.
The seduction of his wife and disintegration of his last few positive human relationships constitute this rest of the film. There is also an extensive subplot about a woman with severe burns on her face who suffers similarly to the protagonist, but hasn’t let her unhappiness turn to bitterness.
The Face is Fundamental to Identity
This film was shot in 1966, when plastic surgery was much less widely accepted and understood. The face was, perhaps more forcefully than today, an immutable part of a person’s identity. Adopting the face of another was a premise of science fiction, even on a scale much more modest than the ‘90s shoot-‘em-up Face Off.
Throughout the film, the protagonist’s new face is depicted as a dominating force. The doctor talks repeatedly about the mask as though it were able to enforce its own personal quirks and abilities on the wearer. The bizarre identity-speculation prefigures Ben Stein’s droning monologue in The Mask, and gives it more serious contemplation.
At the film’s climax the Doctor and patient are speaking in a crowd. The patient is bemoaning his failing relationships, and the doctor is chastising him. By affecting a new identity, the patient assumed that he had no more responsibilities. The protagonist could no longer blame all of his problems on his scars, he had to assume them himself.
This conversation takes place amidst a sea of muddied faces. The people in the crowd all have clumsy clay masks on. Each of them has something to hide, and each of them puts on the persona of a regular man blending into the crowd. Only the Doctor and protagonist, who have examined identity so closely, have features in focus, and this focus alienates them from the rest of humanity.
Face of Another is a Compelling Surreality
Face of Another is strange and compelling. It wears many of its symbols on the surface, but by doing so it can complicate and nuance them to the nth degree. This movie is a brain trap: once you begin dissecting it you won’t be able to stop.
