The Face of Another

A visionary work of urban existentialism, The Face of Another is director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s follow-up to his art-house classic Woman in the Dunes. After being disfigured in an industrial accident, wealthy chemist Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) concedes to a face transplant. Fitted with a new identity, he’s sucked into a whirlpool of paranoia and angst. This fragmented portrait of alienation shares the stark, stylized aesthetic of European modernists from Antonioni and Resnais to Godard’s Alphaville and Bergman’s Persona (released the same year as Teshigahara’s film, as was John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, making 1966 a milestone in split-personality cinema). Teshigahara intensifies the film’s tone of fractured consciousness with a slew of flourishes—freeze-frames, wild zooms, wash-away wipes, surrealist touches, swish pans, and jump cuts. Toro Takemitsu’s eerie and lush electronic score is a fitting accompaniment to this dark fantasy.