Cast

John Marley, Gena Rowlands, Lynn Carlin, Seymour Cassel, Fred Draper, Val Avery, Dorothy Gulliver, Joanne Moore Jordan, Darlene Conley, Gene Darfler, Elizabeth Deering

awards

Venice IFF 1968 – best actor, National Society of Film Critics Awards 1969 – best screenplay, best supporting actor

Film description

Faces opened a new, mature period in Cassavetes’ oeuvre. After the trying experience of working in Hollywood, conflict with friends with whom he made Shadows (some of them sued the director for shares from alleged incomes), and forced idleness (which was a real challenge for an energetic filmmaker), Cassavetes finally began shooting films again. As in scripts written by others, the film’s themes focus on issues he personally experienced. In this case, while staying with middle-class people, the director observed their marriages.

Faces is a film about the life of Maria and Richard Frost after several years of marriage, about their relationship and dynamics of their everyday experiences. It concentrates on a single day where the bored and burned-out Richard, a film executive, tries to change his life through a romance with a luxurious call girl and Maria learns the utter truth about their marriage.

According to Ray Carney, Cassavetes’s biographer, Faces offers the most characteristic features of Cassavetes’ style. It features the differences between male and female characters, but is also about people who treat their lives as a challenge, with every day as something unusual (Carney calls this the adventure of ontological open-endedness), contrasted with people who hide themselves behind forms, formulas and clichés (R. Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 237–242).

Elżbieta Durys