I met the cinematographer of FACES, Al Ruban, yesterday. He told me he didn’t know why anyone would speak to an audience before a movie was shown. I met his wife, too. She concurred. So, I’m respectfully asking that you not listen to a single word I’m about to say…
“Cassavetes movies often deal with opposite extremes. Love and hate, joy and misery, lust and repulsion, respect and derision. These feelings exist as one for Cassavetes. And these opposing forces are overlaid on the actors, so the actors themselves are double exposures.
“There is no symbolism or metaphor—everything is what it is. Cassavetes tries to show life and people for what they are—the true nature.
“And the result—the result is a Marx Brothers movie as re-enacted by the skinned, plasticized bodies of the Bodies Exhibit whose corpses are creeping around the country as I speak.
“Drama and film are also two extremes Cassavetes works with. One is physical, one ghostly. A lot of the earliest talking movies were plays captured onto film. The actors were just this—captured. You get mad when no one ever leaves a house and hops in a car and is seen driving away. Trapped.
“Cassavetes comes from a strong background of live drama and improv. In his movies he smashes through this wall between the physical and the ghostly, to make physical movies. Live movies. Movies that seem to be improvising anew with each viewing.
“FACES holds you down underground in a boozy night that never ends. And when it does end and sunlight hits Jeannie square in the face, she cries.
“Sunlight also finds Maria unconscious, as good as dead on the bathroom floor. But seconds later Jeannie wears the biggest smile in the movie. And minutes later, back from the dead, Maria is wanting a smoke.
“It’s this unbending voracity for life that hits the hardest.
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