faces

ON A VIEWING OF FACES BY JOHN CASSAVETES
AT THE NUART THEATRE IN SANTA MONICA

It was a strange and wonderful experience to see this now old classic which I had seen as a young man when the idea of cinema was more important than the cinema itself, because here in this now forgotten American classic is the sorry story of the our times, lost amidst the drifts, like the cocktails of yesteryear, or lost asteroids, and the splendid isolations of the now past.

In memory we lose ourselves especially in the memories of youth and what comes to mind are the unfulfilled expectations of a future that never was.

Its shot in 16mmArriflex and as Seymour Cassells one of the few remaining members of the John Cassavetes crowd pointed out it was created in an atmosphere of merrymaking and playing ball after an all night of shooting. And playing tricks on the actors.

There is always laughter in the movies of Cassavetes, guffawing galleons of it, where everyone laughs at, and with each other sometimes it seems for hours on end ,and always inevitably ends up crying afraid and lonely and wondering what the fuss was all about.

Faces, in the current crisis of post sexual revolutionary distaff and near paralysis is refreshingly naïve and charmingly unafraid of anything.

It’s about men and women and the search for intimacy, the intimacy to seek and not to find. But mostly it is about passage and loss and Death, which awaits all of us after all the punch lines have been delivered and the search for laughter, for a good time, for connection is always present. Cassavetes was in his 20’s when he made this little flawed masterpiece of sorrowful merriment, of jeering tears. It was a different time, in America, years before the yuppification and consequent abandonment of the tenured, manicured and security guarded homes of America.

It was a different time when people still had time to fuck and husbands were horny satyrs of need and want pursuing wives who were tired of getting pregnant and were just starting to look for the balkanizing sexual shot that would signal the war between men and women.

It was a time when Playboy magazine was still a stiff decked adolescent in razor-sharp trousers, before Dylan and the Rolling Stones even, before the great hyena cry shattered the street and vales of the United States of America.
These characters are still within earshot of the more recent memories of a War that was supposed to end all wars. And peace was upon the land and the lion and the lamb shared their beds together. A time for little boxes and the double standard that was fixed in coin.

At the end of Faces, the seemingly abandoned wife tries to kill herself after she makes love with the beach boy ably played by the very young baby-faced S.Cassels. And then her husband, played mesmerizingly by John Marley returns after an all nighter with a call girl he has fallen in love with, the luminescent Gina Rowlands, whose eyes could search light the darkest night of the soul.

It’s the dark night of the soul Cassavetes examines in spite of the ditties and the singing and the laughter and the corpsing down with laughter, the twilight of the American nightmare.

Everyone is lonely beyond comprehension. In the films of J/john Cassavetes even God is a lonely middle-aged guy, a stranger on a bus somewhere trying to find his way home and as the song goes, with no one to talk to on the phone (except the Pope maybe in Rome). But maybe even the Pope is unavailable to God in these films.

An American Bergman in a weird way, an immigrant Greek American but American through and through like Jack Kerouac. Gregory Corso, and the New York “Pull my Daisy” crowd. In Cassavetes it feels like a disaster at all times but without the threat and menace, the threat here is that someone might burst into tears at any minute. Or hysterical laughter.

This is not an angry man we are witness to, a la John Osborne or a distaff alien like Pinter, all ostracized even if they are from the soil that produced them.
Rowlands in particular carries a crazy sorrow in her eyes. And great beauty and they carry the burden of this beauty these Cassavetes women, like the goat-like men carry scarred acned faces that reveal hidden wounds and wars.

Their blood boils with need, and the clear suspicion that even though they will forever be attracted to beautiful women like moths to fire the clear knowledge that at the most in the society of women they are little boys who will never enter the feminine mystery.

When John Cassavetes made this movie the American woman had not yet divested herself of her clothes. Playboy was only a few years old and America was packed with lonely married men working the corporate dance and pretending to get along. In the films of Cassavetes, in spite of the great supposed male bonding that’s all around and within them…there is a spiritual aloneness that is almost palpable-the guffawing and the trickster tactics of his characters covers up a black void and for this reason it is almost painful to watch and rarely is there release.

There are luminescent close-ups that hold you, freeze the viewer in his tracks and the great empty gulfs between men and women open up in abeyance. It is the women in Cassavetes that carry the spiritually incisive seed of yearning and loss. The men are clowns perpetually stuck in a post adolescent frenzy of knee slapping and with the exception of the young huckster, surfer god, Seymour Casells who shows a deep-seated sense of humanity and openness all the men are frozen clowns terrified of death and of each other- those few moments in which they longingly reach out for love are trapdoored shut when they feel they have been rejected.
We feel their awkwardness and frozen violence, the spoiled remains of a competitive children, now manifesting as grownup, responsible business men who really only want to get laid and be touched by the higher muse of the feminine.

It’s sad and it’s tragic at root and very Greek and Cassavetes in the ancient spirit of his predecessors, the great Greek dramatists senses the underlying tenor of unfulfilled destinies. At the end of FACES the husband returns after an all night carousing with the vacuous and beautiful Gina Rowlands and returns skipping and jumping only to turn into the irate husband again once he realizes that his wife has done the same.

He plays the part of the cuckolded husband, swinging his fury with no awareness of his part in the drama. It is strictly doublestandardized and the film reflects the oppressive weight of marriage to the American male of that time in what now feels like ancient America in which cockmanship and success in business went hand in hand, when two fisted drinking and whoring was the sign of the true and portent male.

What is so sad in the film but not tragic, since tragedy is what occurs when man encounters his limits-is the dawning realization that there is no escape from this box of frozen coupledom.

Like HUSBANDS in which we witness the escapades of 3 grown men who try to recapture their youth and their freedom by running away for the weekend to London, FACES presents the male-female dilemma in a razor edge confluence of sudden nasty encounters followed by emotional pitfalls.

We can find no answer in this film and even though the Sexual Revolution occurred shortly after John Cassavetes made this film and perhaps was part of its disturbance, there is no real solution to the dilemma, because the dilemmas presented here are part of a greater picture that we have yet to grasp.

Nick Mancuso
May 3/06
Los Angeles, Calif.