The Scariest Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: Halloween Weekend Repertory Cinema Picks
The Face of Another (1966)
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
The Japan Society will host a Halloween screening of an unusual horror film, followed by a talk with its still-active star, Tatsuya Nakadai. The actor plays Okuyama, a bandaged chemist in Tokyo whose face was badly burned in an industrial accident. In league with an experiment-minded psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira), the embittered figure obtains a new latex face molded from the visage of another man and commits increasingly bold acts under the guise of being another person—including moves by which his new self aims to seduce his wife (Michiko Kyo). Okuyama’s story is interwoven with that of another, a young woman (Miki Irie) he sees in a film who is driven into seaside isolation with her despairing older brother (Kakuya Saeki) by facial burns likely obtained as a result of the bombing of Nagasaki. Teshigahara’s virtuosic black-and-white work continually shows throngs of people moving through streets while isolating individuals within the crowds. The film quietly plays up the discomfort felt by men and women alike with the social roles that they’ve been given to play in postwar Japan. As Okuyama encounters many other characters that are each, in their own way, deformed, we’re led to wonder what it means to be alone with oneself, especially when the self adopted for wear doesn’t entirely fit. Aaron Cutler (October 31, 7pm at Japan Society, followed by conversation with Tatsuya Nakadai)