After an industrial accident burns his face, a factory technician spends his days moping about with bandages covering his head. Convinced that his disfigurement makes him unfit for human contact, the man resigns himself to a life of seclusion with the wife he believes will never be anything but disgusted by him. But his psychiatrist suggests the use of an experimental mask that will perfectly mimic the look and feel of human skin.
Once the mask is in place, the man tests its effectiveness in a variety of interactions. He is soon convinced that not only is it convincing enough to pass for the real thing, but that his new face makes him unrecognizable to even his closest friends. But when he decides to use the mask to anonymously seduce his own wife, he starts to get in over his head.
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Is it any good?
I have usually been the kind of guy who complains when movies and books simply brush on deeper themes instead of really trying to develop them. But as time goes by, I am starting to wonder why. THE FACE OF ANOTHER, for example, spends a great deal of time dissecting all the possible psychological and symbolic ramifications first of the condition of having no face, and then later of the use of a lifelike mask used to correct that condition. And yet through most of those conversations I found myself impatiently tapping my foot, waiting for the plot to resume.
The story is something of a continuation of EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), but with a couple very important differences. The first is that there is nothing obviously morally wrong about the facial replacement experiments in this movie -- the creation of the mask doesn’t require kidnapping, murder, or even any overt deceit. The second difference is that the experiments succeed and the patient ends up with a perfectly serviceable (though temporary) face. These are pretty important distinctions since it means that THE FACE OF ANOTHER isn’t about science ghoulishly trampling innocent victims for the sake of progress. Instead, it takes a subtler position that questions whether humans are really prepared to deal with all of the potential fallout from scientific advancements.
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I don’t think that THE FACE OF ANOTHER is entirely convincing about the dangers of the specific technology it’s talking about. The doctor seems concerned that cheap, convincing masks would result in the total breakdown of society as everybody assumed anonymous and ever-changing identities. The most interesting part of this discussion is how closely it mirrors a lot of the hand-wringing about the anonymous culture of the Internet (some of which continues even today). But even if we take as a given that some people will always abuse the ability to change or mask their identity, I think the Internet itself has proven pretty conclusively that the majority of folks actually want to be recognized and to recognize others (most of the time anyway). So even though the ability to easily shed identity could plausibly lead to social anarchy, there seem to be fundamental human needs that make it unlikely on a wide scale.
But even though I’m not really convinced by the movie’s hypothesis, it is one of the few that I’ve watched so far that makes a specific comment about technology that is still relevant today -- even if it’s relevant in ways that the film makers probably never imagined. I do wish that they had stuck more with the story and spent less time spinning out complicated theories. Too much of the dialogue felt like a speculative essay, and the tendency of the main character to be overly melodramatic about everything didn’t help much either.
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The movie also has a few surrealistic touches that I am not really sure what to make of. The neatest is probably the doctor’s office, which appears to have been furnished by somebody with a German expressionist sense of humor. It’s full of glass walls covered with arcane diagrams and furniture that’s cast from body parts. There’s another nifty bit at the end where the main character and doctor walk through a crowd of people who all have blanks for faces -- an attempt, I assume, to illustrate what it would be like if everyone were anonymous. It’s a cool image, but probably not as effective as it could be, considering that crowds are already pretty anonymous.
Finally, there’s also a parallel story about a pretty young woman with a bad burn on her face who lives a lonely life with her brother. It’s hard to tell whether her story is meant to be a contrast or a companion to the main action, but even though she leaves her scars unmodified she doesn’t end up with a happy ending either. In the end, I think I’d say that there is almost too much going on in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. Assuming that all of it has a meaning, it’s certainly too much to figure out in a single viewing. The relationship between the main character and his wife (both before and after the mask) is the best part of the movie, and the bits with the doctor are a close second. Distilled down to just those elements, I think this would have been a great flick. But with everything else in there, it’s a bit harder to enjoy as a story.
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