The Best Movie Critic   +  review

Watch THIS Instantly Double Feature: Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968)

Justin here with a look at a couple of movies currently available on Netflix Watch Instantly: John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968).

Shadows (1959)

I decided to watch this on a whim on a Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago. I knew very little going in except that Cassavetes is widely regarded as the father of American independent film. Generally speaking, I'm against the label “independent” to describe any art be it movies or “inde rock.” Typically how something is financed and distributed, either inside or outside of a studio or label situation is a poor way to describe its contents. An independent movie could be any genre. However, Shadows exudes independentness in a way that few other films do. This comes from the raw style in which it was filmed, the superb performances throughout, and the honest way that the movie addresses sexuality. This is a movie that stands apart from every other movie I've seen from this era. There is no way that Shadows could have come from the studio system.

Trying to identify a plot in Shadows is a little tricky. The story follows several people in New York, a group of beatniks, a black singer and his manager, and the singer's sister who has light enough skin to be regarded as white. There is a general arc to things as each of the groups have misadventures and have to confront different preconceptions of themselves. The singer takes himself very seriously has to take a job at a second rate club introducing chorus girls, the beatniks struggle to define themselves between being freewheeling party people or intellectual artists, and the singer's sister deals with a relationship falling apart after her partner discovers she is black.

Aside from the interesting characters, the performances here are all top notch and improvised. John Cassavetes was an actor's director and it shows here. Every single performance in this movie feels true and natural. It feels like Cassavetes decided to put most of his energy here into getting good performances, the filming is great too, but in a effortless documentary style. Rooms are well lit so that the actors can play in them, the camera follows the action and aside from the general rawness of it all, there's not much to say about it. Watching it in 2010, the filming seems incredibly fresh for how minimal the editing and framing is. There is a lack of camera trickery that in this age of post-production wizardry and digital color filters is very refreshing. I almost forgot to mention that the score was done by one of my very favorite musicians, Charles Mingus.

Faces (1968)

I was so impressed and delighted with Shadows that I moved immediately to another Cassavetes movie from about a decade later, Faces.

Faces is another improvisational movie, but it has a much tighter thematic focus than Shadows. Faces is concerns itself with the disintegration of a long term marriage. It is structured around several of what I would consider to be episodes – long scenes, about 20 minutes each, that are all tenuously connected together. Those scenes can be incredibly difficult to watch, each one could be a self contained short, they have definite beginning-middle-end structure. The typical formula of them is that they start happily enough and more and more information is revealed about the characters until there is a turning point that exposes the players for how ugly and petty they actually are.

John Marley does an absolutely amazing job as Richard Forst, an old TV network executive who is detached from his job, his friends, and his wife. He is torn between the comfortable and wanting something new. His wife, Maria (played by Lynn Carlin) is caught off guard by her husbands sudden demand for a divorce. The key difference between the two is how they deal with change. Richard seems to jump head first into trying out a new relationship with a young prostitute he befriends, but he is less than successful at it. He must define himself against her other Johns in one particularly great scene. Maria on the other hand is considerably more successful it would seem. On a lady's night out she and her friends pick up a young gigolo at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go and while she is still desirable to him, she is confronted with facing the reality of life as a single woman in her early 50's when she has had her husband's support for such a long time before that.

If I were to describe Faces in one word it would be “verisimilitude.” The movie feels absolutely true in a way that few movies do. The performances are sincere and the actors convincing. It feels less like artifice and more like real life. The actors are ugly, some physically so, but the camera never shies away from them. But this is all a dream-like truth. While we see Richard and Maria's marriage fall apart,we notice that the dialogue that occurs in the movie has many odd quirks, people break into and out of old pop songs and jingles quite frequently and Richard in particular seems pretty concerned with telling corny jokes. Everything is a little off but not in the way you would expect, or a way that makes is bad. Faces has some of the same qualities of the better parts of David Lynch movies, everything seems very plausible and affecting, but veers off into unexpected places at unexpected times. But maybe that's exactly what it feels like when a 20 some year old marriage falls apart.

While I enjoyed watching Shadows much more than Faces, I found that I couldn't shake Faces. In the week and a half since I watched it, it has stayed in the back of my mind popping up at weird times. It's a challenging movie to watch, but an incredibly rewarding one too.