The Face of Another (他人の顔, Tanin no kao?) is a 1966 Japanese film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and based on the novel of the same name written by Kōbō Abe. The story follows a businessman, Okuyama, who is facially scarred in a laboratory fire and is given new face in the form of a lifelike mask.
Plot
Okuyama's face was disfigured in an industrial accident, and his face is completely covered in burns; he wears bandages to obscure them. He visits Dr. Hira, a psychiatrist who is able to fashion a "mask" for Okuyama to wear which is indistinguishable from the face on which it is modeled.
Hira and Okuyama pay a man 10,000 yen to serve as the model for the mask, and the mask is built and fitted onto Okuyama. Hira cautions Okuyama that the mask may change his behavior and personality so much that he will cease to be the same person that he was. Hira believes that this disassociation with his identity will cause Okuyama to lose his sense of morality if he is not careful.
Okuyama tells no one that he has received the mask, and simply lives as a new man, telling his wife that he is traveling on business while he rents an apartment nearby. He decides to seduce his wife, and does so with surprising ease. Afterwards he confronts his wife, angry that she had so readily been unfaithful to him, and she tells him that she knew all along that it was him. She assumed that he had devised the scenario as a masquerade which would rekindle their marriage.
Okuyama's wife is disgusted when she finds that he was trying to trap her, and leaves. Okuyama follows her home, but she refuses to let him enter, and so he wanders the streets. He encounters a woman, assaults her in the street, and is arrested. Hira picks him up from the police station, and the two walk out into the night. They encounter a crowd of faceless people walking in the opposite direction. When the crowd passes, Okuyama stabs Hira.
Interleaved throughout the film is a completely separate tale of a young woman whose face is halfway disfigured. She works in a home for World War II veterans and lives with her brother. She fears that another war may be near. The imagery of the film suggests that her scars came as a result of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.[1] Unlike Okuyama, she seems reasonably at peace with her disfigurement, and makes no serious attempts to escape from her own face. At the end of the film she leaves her brother and walks into the ocean, presumably drowning herself.
Themes
The film is often described as being the third in a trilogy of films by Teshigahara, following his two earlier films Pitfall and The Woman in the Dunes. These were both also based on novels by Kōbō Abe, shot by Hiroshi Segawa, and scored by Toru Takemitsu. Like the other two films, The Face of Another was shot in black and white and in full-frame aspect ratio, even though these formats had gone out of style by the time of its production. Common themes in these films deal are identity, masks, doppelgangers, and distorted social relations.
The film uses several doublings of shots, both by repeating shots verbatim and by placing the main character in nearly identical shots twice. The most obvious example is in Okuyama's two separate rentals of apartments, once masked, and once with his new face. These doublings highlight Okuyama's double existence.[1]
Production
One recurring image is the large and small severed ears which appears in the scenery in several scenes. These ears were designed and sculpted by Japanese sculptor Tomio Miki.[1]
Hira's office, a strange blank space with glass partitions, was designed by architect Arata Isozaki, a friend of Teshigahara's.[1] The glass walls are painted with Langer's lines and the Vitruvian Man.
Reception
Outside of Japan, the film was a critical and financial failure at the time of its release. Audiences and critics largely felt that it did not live up to Teshigahara's earlier film The Woman in the Dunes.[1]
References
See also
External links
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The films of Hiroshi Teshigahara |
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| 1960s |
Pitfall • Woman in the Dunes • That Tender Age (segment) • Jose Torres II • The Face of Another • Explosion Course • The Ruined Map
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| 1970s |
Summer Soldiers
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| 1980s |
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| 1990s |
Basara - The Princess Goh
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