The Face of Another: Teshigahara's Mask and Identity

The psychiatrist’s consulting room in The Face of Another (1966) is a set you cannot forget once you have seen it. Sheets of glass hang in space with anatomical diagrams printed on them, so that figures walk behind their own cross-sections. Enormous model ears are mounted on the walls. A staircase leads up through nothing. Arata Isozaki designed it — Isozaki, who went on to become one of the major architects of the century and a Pritzker laureate — and Teshigahara photographs it as though the room itself has a diagnosis.

That is the film in one image: an idea about identity, built as architecture, and shot with a coldness that has made this the least loved and most argued-over of the Teshigahara–Kōbō Abe collaborations. I have watched it four times over about fifteen years and my opinion has moved every time. It is currently the one I think about most.

The premise

Okuyama is a businessman whose face has been destroyed in an industrial accident. He is introduced in bandages, voice muffled, a man reduced to a wrapping. His psychiatrist offers him a solution: a mask, moulded from a stranger’s face, indistinguishable from real skin. Okuyama takes it.

What he does with it is the film. He rents a separate flat. He constructs a second identity. And he sets out to seduce his own wife as another man, to test whether she will have him — which is the ugliest and most fascinating decision any character makes in 1960s Japanese cinema, because it is presented as an experiment and functions as a punishment.

Tatsuya Nakadai plays Okuyama. Machiko Kyō — the wife — is one of the great faces of Japanese cinema, and casting her in a film about the meaning of a face is not accidental. Mikijirō Hira plays the psychiatrist, and it is the performance that holds the whole thing together: amused, faintly predatory, in love with his own procedure. Kyōko Kishida, the woman from Woman in the Dunes, plays the nurse.

Abe adapted his own novel. Tōru Takemitsu wrote the score, and here he does something extraordinary that I will come back to.

Why the coldness is the method

The standard complaint about this film is that it is airless, schematic, more essay than drama. That complaint is accurate as a description of the experience and wrong as a criticism, and the reason is that the coldness is doing the work.

Teshigahara’s problem is that his protagonist’s condition — a man who has lost the interface between himself and everyone else — has no visual equivalent. You cannot photograph alienation; you can only photograph a man being alienated, which is acting, which is soft. So Teshigahara photographs the world as though it has already been abstracted. Isozaki’s glass room removes the wall between inside and outside. The X-ray plates make bodies transparent. The film is full of surfaces that fail to conceal: windows, glass, mirrors, medical illustration, the mask itself. Okuyama’s condition has been distributed into the production design, so that when the film cuts to a bar or a street the ordinary world looks like the aberration.

Takemitsu’s contribution is the sharpest joke in the film. At a key point he scores the action with a German-language waltz — a beer-hall lilt, jaunty and grotesque, playing over a man walking through Tokyo in a stranger’s skin. The cue arrives with no diegetic excuse whatsoever. It is the film laughing at its own protagonist, and it is one of the most effective uses of music-as-commentary in the decade.

The second story

There is a parallel strand, and it is the reason the film survives its own thesis. A young woman with severe scarring on one side of her face — the damage read as radiation injury from Nagasaki — lives with her brother in a seaside town. Her sequences run in a different visual register: soft, natural light, sea, wind, no glass.

The film cuts between the two stories without ever formally connecting them. Okuyama has a mask and a psychiatrist and a scheme; she has a face nobody will meet and no scheme at all. He has chosen his experiment; the war chose hers. Placing them side by side is Abe’s most devastating move, and it converts the film from a clever fable about identity into an argument about who is permitted to be a philosophical subject and who simply has to live with it.

That strand also lets Teshigahara make his real point about Japan in 1966. The businessman’s crisis is elective. The country’s was inflicted on it, and a nation twenty-one years past the bomb had arranged an enormous amount of new glass and new concrete over the top of the evidence.

The mask’s manufacture is worth a paragraph on its own, because it is where the film is most purely pleasurable. Teshigahara shoots the fabrication as a procedural: the moulding, the casting, the hair set one strand at a time, the tinting of the skin, the fitting. It is patient, tactile, almost loving — the only sequence in the picture with any warmth in it — and the warmth belongs entirely to the psychiatrist, who is enjoying his craft. The film gives its most beautiful passage to the man building the trap. Hira plays those scenes like a tailor. Nakadai, still bandaged, sits and receives them like furniture, and the imbalance is the point: a face is being made for him by somebody else, which is precisely how faces have always worked.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches for Eyes Without a Face, Franju’s 1960 film, and the connection is genuine — a surgeon, a ruined face, a mask, a cold clinical beauty. Teshigahara certainly knew it.

The real ancestor is the Universal Invisible Man (1933). A man is given a physical condition that removes him from social observation; he immediately discovers that observation was the only thing making him behave; he goes rotten within a fortnight. Griffin’s arc is Okuyama’s arc exactly, minus the special effects and plus a psychiatrist to narrate the descent. Both films argue that the self is a thing other people hold on your behalf, and that a man who gets it back to himself will do something unforgivable with it within the week.

Within Teshigahara’s own run the film sits between Pitfall, which asks what a man is when nobody can see him at all, and Woman in the Dunes, which asks what he is when he cannot leave. The three make a sequence, and it is worth watching them in order.

The case against

It really is airless. The middle act, in which the psychiatrist explains the philosophy of masks to a patient who has already grasped it, is a long lecture with excellent lighting, and Abe the novelist wins several arguments that Teshigahara the director should have cut. Nakadai — an actor of tremendous power, one of the greats — spends much of the film behind a mask that suppresses precisely the thing he is best at, which is a face doing three things at once. The casting logic is impeccable and the dramatic cost is real.

And the film’s treatment of the wife is thin. Kyō is one of the finest actors ever to work in the medium and she is given a role that exists to be tested, until the very end, when the film hands her one line of judgement that rewrites everything preceding it and by then it is late.

The verdict

The most intellectually ambitious film of the great partnership and the least seductive. Woman in the Dunes gets you through the body; this one refuses to touch you and asks you to think instead, which is why it took me four viewings to stop resisting and start admiring. It is a genuine work of science fiction — the premise is a piece of speculative technology, and every consequence is worked out with the rigour of hard SF — dressed as an art film, which is why neither audience quite claimed it.

Watch it for Isozaki’s room, for Hira’s psychiatrist, for the waltz, and for the Nagasaki strand, which is the best twenty minutes of anything Teshigahara shot. The restorations of the Abe collaborations have been in circulation for years; the film needs a clean transfer more than most, because the whites and the glass are the argument.

Spoilers below

The wife knew.

Okuyama executes his seduction, and it works, and he takes the arrangement as proof of her infidelity — proof that a face is all a marriage ever was. He confronts her with it, triumphant, cruel, ready to indict her for sleeping with a stranger.

She tells him she recognised him from the beginning. She played along because she thought it was what he needed. And she leaves, because the man who devised that test is someone she cannot be married to, whatever he has on his face.

It is the finest reversal in the Teshigahara–Abe corpus, and it destroys the film’s own premise from inside. The mask never worked. The one person whose recognition mattered was never fooled for a moment, which means Okuyama’s alienation was self-administered from the start — the accident merely gave him a reason to admit it.

What he does afterwards is worse, and the film handles it with tremendous restraint: freed of the belief that anyone can see him, he commits a violent act in the street, and the psychiatrist — who has watched the whole experiment with a scientist’s delight — is there for the ending, having built the thing that did it.

The Nagasaki strand ends earlier and quietly, and its resolution is the one that stays with me. She has no mask and no consultation and no thesis. She has a face people flinch from, a brother, and the sea, and what she chooses to do about it is unbearable precisely because Teshigahara refuses to explain it. Okuyama gets three acts and a lecture. She gets a landscape and a decision. The film knows which of them it took seriously.