I have just watched "The face of another" twice, and am still feeling the reverberations of it's meaning. The emotional/psychological insights of Abe and Teshigahara, spoken through the characters of Okuyama and the psychiatrist, will give you more than enough to ponder. What are we in relationship to others if we are faceless; characterless? How are we to measure ourselves if our experience has no relativity to the world outside? Right from the beginning, the film establishes it's goal of revealing, heartbreakingly, the insecurity of the individual. Okuyama tries hard to laugh at his fate but the truth of his dependence on acceptance wears him thin and forces his well meaning wife and colleagues to the brink of their own prejudices. Tatsuya Nakadai, perfectly takes Okuyama from voluntary, shamed exile to hiding in plain sight, seeming to miss how that transformation might have occurred. While Mikijiro Hira goes for the ride, with a scientists abandon for the experiment, despite his very clear understanding of the pitfalls of invisibility.
There is a small story within the larger one, that of a young girl whose face, on one side, has been horribly disfigured (the other side is startlingly beautiful) by the bomb at Nagasaki. The first viewing of this left me feeling that this section was curious but disjointed. The second viewing had me considering, a bit more, some of the accompanying imagery that we see in these scenes. What really stands out are the images of soldiers in an asylum, the fire range and the strangely pictorial images of her and her brother at the beach. There is also her constant fear of another war. I began to see her story as a metaphor for the changing, perhaps now horribly disfigured face, of Japan itself. Coupling this idea with some of the urban crowd scenes in the main story or the body parts in vitrines in the doctor's office I began to feel the two stories weave together.
For the avid film lover, this movie is also a treat for the eyes with stunning set designs, doppelgangers, mirrored scenes and well placed, well timed editing twists.
A must see!!!
There is a small story within the larger one, that of a young girl whose face, on one side, has been horribly disfigured (the other side is startlingly beautiful) by the bomb at Nagasaki. The first viewing of this left me feeling that this section was curious but disjointed. The second viewing had me considering, a bit more, some of the accompanying imagery that we see in these scenes. What really stands out are the images of soldiers in an asylum, the fire range and the strangely pictorial images of her and her brother at the beach. There is also her constant fear of another war. I began to see her story as a metaphor for the changing, perhaps now horribly disfigured face, of Japan itself. Coupling this idea with some of the urban crowd scenes in the main story or the body parts in vitrines in the doctor's office I began to feel the two stories weave together.
For the avid film lover, this movie is also a treat for the eyes with stunning set designs, doppelgangers, mirrored scenes and well placed, well timed editing twists.
A must see!!!