The Face of Another

The Face of Another is an old black and white Japanese film, and is quite interesting in both its layered sets and its investigation into what makes a person a person. In this plot the main character has had an accident to his face, and as he says, 'It's always the monster's fault.' Once damaged in that way there's no fitting into society, and he can have no encounters uncomplicated by his otherness. To his wife he observes that she seems to feel that speaking to him is like talking to a hole in the wall - because he has lost something that made him human in others' eyes. He feels like a monster, too, and says things that no ordinary man would say. That the loathing is self-generated both allies the character with everyone else and separates him from them.

There's a lot of layers in not just the sets, and the acting is very good. Parts of it felt uncannily like what was being described was online personas, particularly in one scene in a beer cellar as the doctor talked about mass-producing masks. On the Internet, as we all know, an ordinary person who thinks he won't be identified may become rude and out of control - this is similar in a way to this plot in that the human identifier is not there, so the person feels free to act like a monster.

Labels: Netflix