John Cassavetes is certainly an interesting director (great actor too, but interesting director). Instead of directing films for entertainment, he directs them to present a "slice-of-life", so to speak, only one that is usually tumultuous and unkind. His movies are generally uphill battles to watch, but they're worth it.

In this film, an over-the-hill man and woman break up and pursue other, younger paramours. While successful, they still have to deal with their own separate pain and fear of many things, amongst them age, loneliness, and friendship.

The writing and the acting are the most important parts. The writing is at times brilliant, the rest of the time brutal. Cassavetes tries for a more realistic, human approach, which means characters go off in tangents, talk unproductively, and are often really mean to each other. The acting complements the dialog so perfectly that one doesn't see actors on screen, but characters; only moreso than characters, one sees people, as if watching a home video with a disturbing and powerful plot.

Cassavetes was also one to specifically not care about structure. This makes the directing, editing, and cinematography rather jarring and condense. Luckily, it works with the themes of this movie well enough that the movie itself maintains a sense of entrapment and abuse.

It's a great film, though it's an uphill battle to watch. It's amazingly written but it's very inaccessible. I'd recommend it, but you must heed that it won't be something you can just sit down and escape into.

--PolarisDiB

This is obviously not your average, everyday movie. It's some thing you could only watch at an art-house theater, so clearly this movie is not for just everyone.

John Cassavetes was a sort of guerrilla film-maker. His movies never felt like it had any storyboards or were rehearsed in any way. There was never a pre-setup plan, concerning any of its camera-work or positions and the actors all also seemed to be ad-libbing at points. They were just simply shooting away, which gives the movie a very raw and authentic feeling. I think this is the foremost reason why people really like his movies. I myself can appreciate it but that doesn't mean I'm that fond or impressed with it as well.

No, it's not really an easy or pleasant movie to watch. It's because the story is not really following a clear main plot line and things just seem to happen very randomly. I just simply prefer a more clear and straightforward story, since it also seemed to me that because of Cassavetes' approach, some of the sequences seemed to go on for ever and often weren't making that much sense for the story either.

I can still understand the story and what Cassavetes was trying to do and tell with it. It's basically a look into married life and not about any of its peachy or happy aspects. But however, like I mentioned before, I would had been more taken by it and probably would had find the story to be a more interesting one, if it had a more straightforward story and approach to it.

But yet I never hated watching this movie either. I can still definitely appreciate the way it got made and also all of the actors were a joy to watch. The movie really has some fine actors in it and I was especially fond of John Marley's performance. It were however Lynn Carlin and Seymour Cassel who received an Oscar nomination for their roles in this move.

Actually it seems quite amazing to me how this movie managed to score 3 Oscar nominations, since it's such an artistic movie, that normally would hardly get ever noticed or recognized by any of the big award shows. It perhaps says something about the popularity or status of director and writer John Cassavetes at the time or how people looked at movies.

For most people this movie will probably be too tough to bite through, or it simply won't be interesting enough to sit through but there is still a large crowd for these sort of movies out there. So if it sounds like it's your thing, chances are you'll probably end up loving it.

7/10

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In reviewing writer-director John Cassavetes' cinema verite-styled "Faces" for the New Yorker, film critic Pauline Kael was more interested in the theater audience's reaction to the picture than the picture itself. She noted that everyone in the crowd seemed to accept this "bad office party" with the utmost seriousness, as if what they were witnessing was extremely personal and important. "Faces" is probably still quite important to revolutionary filmmakers, but it doesn't feel very personal. Cassavetes views a sad, crumbling, upper-class marriage between a businessman and a housewife in Los Angeles with blank eyes. The conversation between the two is vapid and disconnected--and later, when the couple separates and he finds company with a prostitute while she brings home a gigolo, the dialogue remains flat and monotonous. Is Cassavetes trying to say that some marriages become zombie-fied to the point where no amount of conversation breaks through? The wife overdoses on pills and is rescued by the stud, but when the husband comes back and sees the bottle and the mess in the bathroom, he doesn't even ask her about it. The film is stultified by its need to be raw and uncompromising in an arty fashion (with Mount Rushmore-like close-ups of the four principals, a gambit which gets tiresome). Flickers of truth permeate the production, though it isn't very well-shot or lighted, and the editing (purposefully) allows scenes to ramble on passed their emotional peak. ** from ****