他人の顔 The Face of Another (1966)
Director: 勅使河原 宏 Hiroshi Teshigahara
Okuyama (Yojimbo's Tatsuya Nakadai), after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist's radical experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger. As Okuyama is thus further alienated from the world around him, he finds himself giving in to his darker temptations.
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Runtime: 122 minutes
“The face is the door to the soul”, says Mr. Okuyama while standing by the window in a dark apartment, lamenting the loss of his face. Indeed, the face is the first thing people form an impression of, and it is normal for us to want to put on a mask to hide our true self behind a more impressive front, more so in this era of social media. But it is also easy for us to lose track of our identity and morality. As such, The Face of Another is a masterpiece in its ability to transcend nationality in its topic and still be relevant half a century after its release.
The Face of Another follows Mr. Okuyama, whose face was disfigured in an industrial accident, and has to wear bandages to cover his scars. His psychiatrist offers to make him a mask that can give him a new identity as an experiment, but he must be honest with the psychiatrist about his intentions with the mask. But the longer Okuyama wears the mask, the more he starts to give in to his darker temptations. Interweaved with this main narrative is a separate story about a young woman who has a huge scar on the right side of her face. She works at a mental hospital full of World War II veterans and lives with her older brother.
The bandages Okuyama wears after his accident acts as a barrier between him and the life he had, and it results in his bitterness and hatred towards people. Even when his wife says “Eyes aren’t only for looking at faces”, Okuyama assumes that she is merely assuming a higher moral ground by “accepting” him but is actually repulsed by his disfigurement. His bitterness leads to him wanting to take revenge on her, at first thinking of cutting up her face to take away her looks, but when he hears of the psychiatrist’s experiment, he decides to use his new face to seduce his wife.
Okuyama’s new identity is the creation of his psychiatrist, which reminds me of Frankenstein, and soon the psychiatrist realises that his creation has become a monster. The psychiatrist, through his experiment on Okuyama, tries to live a life that he does not have the courage to do so, giving Okuyama a new face and freedom from societal labels. But at the same time, we see that the psychiatrist is having an affair with his nurse and is constantly being monitored by his wife, and so this creation of a new identity for Okuyama is also for his own satisfaction, a taste of playing god, instead of being just an ordinary man watched constantly by his wife.
The Face of Another is also similar to Georges Franju’s 1960 classic horror film Eyes Without a Face, with the same idea of transferring a face onto a disfigured person. However, while Eyes Without a Face is more grounded in reality and focuses on the more visual aspects of the idea, The Face of Another is more surrealistic in its visuals and delves deeper into the philosophical aspects of appearance and identity.
The psychiatrist warns Okuyama that he could become a slave to the mask and that it could destroy human morality, claiming that the mask will lead to the elimination of names, occupations and other labels that make up our social relations. And even though it sounds unbelievable, the truth is, this prophecy has already happened. In our age of social media, isn’t everyone wearing a mask of sorts? Our profiles are our sense of identity, and some people even have multiple identities online. When we see a profile without a proper picture of the user, it creates a sense of anxiety within us. Many of us are also different when conversing online as compared to chatting face-to-face. Though we do not wear a literal mask like Okuyama, how many of us can say that we are able to see ourselves for who we truly are?
On the surface, the film focuses on alienation and the loss of individual identity, but on a deeper level, it emphasizes a loss of national identity through the existential crisis of individual versus the community. The parallel narrative of the disfigured woman constantly echoes the devastation and negative aftereffects of World War II on contemporary Japan, a nation suffering even after two decades. She constant reminisces about her beautiful childhood and fears that there will be an upcoming war, and she asks her brother if he remembers the sea at Nagasaki, suggesting that they lived there previously and her scar may be a result of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This fear of the future and constant looking back at the past is a tragic reflection of Japan’s post-war state.
Some constant motifs throughout the film are body part replicas and glass and reflective materials. The psychiatrist’s office is decorated with panes of glass that consist of anatomical drawings and body part replicas, constantly changing throughout the film and when paired with inconsistent lighting and daring compositions, highlights the film’s surrealistic approach to its brutally human topic. The constant use of mirrors and glass allows viewers to see the characters reacting to their own reflections, reminding them of their existence, but they are often startled by what they see in the mirror. By framing the characters through a piece of glass or through mirrors, it separates us from the characters, as though we are watching them through a screen, and even the introduction of the main character is seen through an X-Ray screen, exposing him to his core yet hiding his physical being from us.
The idea of masks in the film is very broad, from the physical bandages to the literal mask Okuyama wears, and the disfigured woman’s hair acting as a mask to hide her scar, to more metaphorical ideas whereby all social interactions are forms of masks and lies. Even the glass and mirrors act as a mask for these characters, separating them from us, a barrier between fiction and reality.
The charm of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another isn’t in its bizarre premise, but in its philosophical examination of a deeply disturbing truth of the human nature. While masks can give us the freedom and confidence to do what we desire, it can also cause us to lose track of who we really are.
★★★★½ (4.5 stars out of 5)
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