Faces

As in Roma città aperta, a watershed collision of documentary and opera. John Cassavetes helps himself to a chunk of Pirandello for the preamble, the surly executive (John Marley) at the screening room for the movie in which he's one of the characters. "The, huh, Dolce Vita of the commercial field... an impressionistic document that shocks." "Is that so?" Out of The Losers Club and into the lair of the prostitute (Gena Rowlands), then home to the missus (Lynn Carlin), always a stage for a performance. "The pompous puke of all time" and his colleague locked in rancid vaudeville routines for the gal they picked up, she keeps up with a rendition of "I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair" until one of the fellows brings things to a halt by asking her price. Strenuous horseplay is the spécialité de la maison, songs, limericks, mock-crying and gales of raspy laughter, anything to ward off the absolute terror of silence. Wife and friends meanwhile venture into the discotheque and bring home a hepcat (Seymour Cassel), Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle illuminates the rest. "How did we get into this?" "How the hell do we get out?" Life as turbulent torrent, everyone flails to keep from drowning. A grueling instantaneity gets to the bottom of Chayefsky's The Bachelor Party and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a roving, handheld image perpetually on the verge of collapse. Opening and closing on staircases, a classical structure for the rough modernist, the infinite tenderness that is the Cassavetes gaze. "Nobody has the time to be vulnerable to each other. So we just go on." Dreyer is a formal mainstay, mainly La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc plus a flash of Ordet for the revivification of the comatose dame. "Sometimes you need a friend." "So buy a dog!" The jibe at Bergman is of course returned in Scenes from a Marriage. Cinematography by Al Ruban. With Fred Draper, Val Avery, Dorothy Gulliver, Darlene Conley, Gene Darfler, Joanne Moore Jordan, and Elizabeth Deering. In black and white.