Tanin no kao

Once again, it's time to do a post on a foreign-language film that had been sitting on my DVR long enough that it was about to expire. This time, it's a Japanese film, The Face of Another.

Dr. Hiro works with prosthetic body parts, but he says that he's not really a plastic surgeon, but by training a psychiatrist. The prostheses really only serve the purpose of filling holes in the psyche caused by the loss of body parts, and that his job is to deal with the underlying psychiatric problems.

Mr. Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) is a man who works in some sort of industrial design company that utilizes cryogenics as part of its manufacturing processes. Unfortunately, he was doing an experiment in which he was supposed to use liquid air (disproportionately nitrogen) with enhanced oxygen, but was given liquid oxygen instead. This resulted in an industrial accident that badly disfigured him, leaving him permanently wearing bandages around his face. At least the rest of his body doesn't seem to have been damaged. Okuyama is married, but worries that his wife (Machiko Kyo) is falling out of love with him because of the bandages and the fact that the injuries have caused other issues like sensitivity to noises.

With that in mind, Mr. Okuyama goes to Dr. Hiro for help. Hiro comes up with an idea, but it's an experimental one, and also an idea that highly tests the limit of medical ethics. (To be fair, the job of a medical ethicist is to come up with rationalizations for things normal people would consider totally unethical.) Hiro's idea is to create a facial mask that looks exactly like a real human face that Okuyama could wear. The small problem is how to get a face that will suit Okayama, although at least unlike Eyes Without a Face, Dr. Hiro only needs to cast a mold of somebody else's face. The bigger problem is that that Hiro believes having a different face will completely change Okuyama's personality. Indeed, if science could change everybody's faces, all sorts of human problems could be solved, which is ridiculous but thankfully not overly explored in the movie, at least not explicitly beyond one speech from Hiro. Okuyama goes through with the operation, getting a mask that has to be taken off at night (how it doesn't get damaged is not mentioned). But does it really change his personality?

Meanwhile, there's a subplot. Miki Irie plays a character who I don't think has a name in the film, only listed as "Girl With Scar". She's from Nagasaki, suggesting she survived the atomic bombing there but left with a badly scarred right side of her face. She works at a different psychiatric clinic, dealing with the men whose psyches were destroyed by serving in World War II. She lives with her brother, and worries about another possible atomic bomb falling.

The Face of Another is a movie that has some interesting ideas and certainly some interesting visuals, but one that I think is going to be a bit difficult for people who, like me, don't speak Japanese. It wasn't until I read the synopsis that I realized that the Girl With a Scar is not in fact one of Dr. Hiro's nurses, and that the two storylines never really intersect. Some of the philosophical ideas are also presented clumsily, as well, making the movie feel a bit slow and bloated coming in at right about two hours. (Eyes Without a Face, which I mentioned earlier, clocks in at a spritghtly 90 minutes.)

So, while there's some worthwhile stuff in The Face of Another, there are certainly other movies I'd recommend more highly.