The Face of Another

Director Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another, adapted from a novel of the same name by Kōbō Abe, is a claustrophobic and unsettling experience. As well as a style of photography, courtesy of Hiroshi Segawa, that stays in close proximity to its subjects and appraises their faces (or even the webs of bones and muscle that flex underneath) like alien topography, the film's soundtrack repeatedly stresses a sense of unusual intimacy. The film's dialogue is a cacophony of aside and whisper. The crackling, single-channel audio dominated by the voice of actor Tatsuya Nakadai, playing a middle-aged engineer who has accidentally destroyed his face during a workplace experiment. In its earliest passages, before Nakadai's Mr. Okuyama is presented with handsome replacement features by an inquisitive psychiatrist, this voice is at its loudest. Okuyama talking his way through the abstracted existence that comes with having a countenance so ruined that it must be bound up and concealed from everybody else. 

So close is this voice that we often feel as if we've been bandaged up and trapped inside the mask with him. Thanks to his catastrophic injury, Okuyama has become unstuck in a post-Second World War society that turns away from deformity and the maimed, preferring to pretend that they don't exist. Okuyama's mummified face, and the frequent meetings he takes, immerse him in the strange, disconnected privilege that is foisted upon the pitied. He can rant and rave with impunity, basically. If anything, these diatribes are expected from such a creature. Not only does Okuyama resemble The Invisible Man in James Whale's film then, he even talks like him too - an aggrieved ego who chatters in violent fantasy about the anonymity that has been forced upon him. In one cackling aside he reveals to a shocked wife, who now cannot bear to touch her husband, that he has considered disfiguring her too, as a kind of redress for her sudden physical coldness. This bubbling mania is curtailed somewhat when Okuyama receives his mask. 

Retreating to a rented apartment, Okuyama busies himself by launching into the kind of superficial lifestyle that he believes befits his new face: spending money on clothes and sunglasses; drinking with the similarly good-looking, and curiously amoral, psychiatrist who cast his mask. As with John Frankenheimer's Seconds, released the same year, The Face of Another considers a person's sense of self in terms of curtailed possibilities. How the assumption of a new, even idealised identity doesn't necessarily override the confused, human longings that it now conceals. Concurrently with Okuyama's middle-class thrashing we see brief interludes that follow actress Miki Irie as a young woman marked by, presumably, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Unlike the comparatively affluent Okuyama, Irie's unnamed character is not only shunned for her facial scarring but quite unable to buy her way out of her predicament. Her despondency then does not revolve around the petty grudges and marital trickery that Okuyama blunders into but an all-consuming, screaming sadness that can only be silenced by crashing surf.