Faces

Without a doubt for me, John Cassavetes’ masterpiece. With two houses, a bar, a handful of middle-aged suburban Americans, a young woman, a young man, and one lousy night, Cassavetes has crafted a veritable and definitive odyssey on American bourgeois emptiness. People teeter between being decisive and reverting back into convention. They whimsically, impulsively, drunkenly shift from impulse to impulse, but their impulses can never muster up enough conviction to overpower the doubt, the emptiness, the oppressive fear, the existential void. They are either unable to say what they mean, or they say what they mean too clearly. They embarrass themselves in the futile pursuit of freedom from social customs and bureaucratic structures, and suffocative relationships, and shirts and ties and boardrooms and ovens and televisions and the whole fucking thing, but they are unable to fully let go. They always return, they always apprehend, they never quite follow through. The only thing birthed from this marriage of unabashed self-humiliation and weary indecisiveness is destruction. It’s an ultimately destructive film, but even then, these people have nothing to revert into but their ruins. Every once in a while, you see something beautiful - you see a spark, a brief indication of genuine regard and affection, but the spark will inevitably be extinguished by the cruel pinch of convention. After all, there was never going to be a divorce. Through adultery, hatred, mutual misery and suicide, through all the anguish, persists the unifying image of two people, one at the top of the stairs and one at the bottom, united by their smoker’s coughs, wheezing on the smoke that fills their tired lungs with the grant of momentary reprieve. The thing, however, that truly makes this film a masterpiece is the form, the style. For Cassavetes, there is no such thing as narrative. Of course, his films take place within albeit loose narratives, but he only really treats them as a necessary mould for everything else to be fitted into. He doesn’t care, for instance, that at this moment you might choose to distance the camera to accommodate the mood and place the viewer’s emphasis on the bigger picture. Everything for Cassavetes is about the intricacies of character; unrelentingly so. The entirety of the intensity of Cassavetes’ camera is focused solely on showing his characters’ faces in minute intimacy. He explores their withered countenances with such up-close consistency, that he practically ingrains it into his own idiosyncratic film language. The film feels spontaneous and loose, but the intelligence of the craft is genuinely second to none. The editing in particular is of an incredibly high degree of excellence. The cinematic convention of logical spatial and metric linearity is disregarded by Cassavetes for a style which is more like a synthesis of emotions rather than of space and time. It feels like the spaces in which the action takes place aren’t entirely linear, that there’s not true continuity - certainly not spatial continuity. The sense of linearity comes purely from sensorial synthesis. He has taken separate fragments of emotion or perspective, and has assembled them into something that seems linear. Cassavetes has a remarkable, uniquely expressive approach to filmmaking, and an un-copyable one at that. He is, without doubt, the greatest independent filmmaker of all time.