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Hiroshi Teshigahara--The Face of Another
(The language in the following post contains idiosyncratic "Pancakeisms" whose usage is improper but delicious English.)
Teshigahara continued to rock with The face of another, the third movie of his I've seen based on a story by the surrealist Kobo Abe (incidentally the first ever Japanese writer I read and in my youthful innocence thought must embody Japanness itself, because he's so STRANGE.)
Two disfigured people in the movie, one a man burnt in an accident, the other a girl victim of the A-bomb, handle their physical monstrosity in opposite ways: he wears a mask so perfect it looks like a real face, and begins to lose himself to the mask, she merely concedes some protection to others by wearing her hair so it covers the scarred side, but as the film and her end near she frees her scar completely.
As an aside, Teshigahara has a RARE gift for the saxxy. Okay--where Woman in the dunes is concerned people trumpet about its "eroticism" so much you are surprised (if you're me) by how secondary the sex is--I was totally misled by one reference to In the empire of the senses--it isn't that the story is sexy, it's Teshigahara's touch that is.
So, in Face..., the short sequence when the burned man is seducing his wife (who pushed him away when he was bandaged and yields when he's wearing the mask)--we watch the seduction unfold under the table in a café, his legs squeezing between hers, like a pulsing bass line to the ever more destabilized dialogue above.
HOTT!
Although I admit I find Tatsuya Nakadai HOTT a priori, after all the samurai movies I saw him in. Hotter'n Mifune!
Omg, the comment. But pretty much on the mark AND OBVIOUSLY WHY I LOVE HIM!
He is intense, perhaps too intense for many viewers, and his tendency to portray tormented and slanted toward evil characters have made him the perennial "other side".
Post je objavljen 03.08.2006. u 22:21 sati.