Masako (acclaimed stage actress Naomi Fujiyama, in her starring debut) is a middle-aged woman working as a seamstress at her mother's shabby dry cleaning business/home. In a not uncommon family arrangement, Masako shares the cramped, old-fashioned house with her mother (Misako Watanabe) and younger sister Yukari (Riho Makise), a vivacious bar hostess who treats her sullen, uncommunicative elder sister with great disrespect, taunting Masako about her lifelong mental illness.

When their mother dies and Yukari announces that she and her boyfriend plan to convert the run-down business into a coffeeshop, Masako strangles Yukari to death (offscreen). Initially, Masako contemplates suicide, but eventually leaves home with the envelopes full of cash given by friends for the funeral.

And then providence aids Masako in her escape. The January 17, 1995 earthquake strikes Kobe, and in the chaos that follows, Masako drifts from situation to another, working as a cleaning lady at a love hotel (using the alias "Mariko Kaga," the name of a famous actress), as a bar hostess herself, and finally helping out an old fisher lady selling dried octopus on a remote Kyushu island.

Face is filmed in that deliberately-paced, minimalist style common to "serious" Japanese films ever since Jim Jarmusch made a big splash in the 1980s. Often this results in intensely irritating, self-conscious pretentiousness, but in this case the story and characters are immediately interesting, and the pacing and style is in tune with the material. This doesn't stop Sakamoto from using a few attention-grabbing flourishes here and there, few of which work because they're just dropped in and inconsistently used. A very early scene finds Masako sewing some material with zoo animals, which leads to an extravagantly-staged daydream with the woman eating bento on a grassy knoll full of full-sized giraffes, zebras, and the like, but no other daydreams follow it. Other early scenes use the camera to present Masako's subjective (and moderately crazy view of the world). One scene, for example, has Masako exiting a train station, and both she and the camera have to adjust their "eyes" to the brightness of the snow outside. The problem with this device is that Sakamoto uses it for other characters, too, such as Masako's mother in the moments before her death, making its purpose rather unclear.

Still, Sakamoto and co-writer Isamu Uno are intriguingly empathetic to Masako and the various losers she encounters during her flight from justice, even the two men who rape her along the way. "I like people who are wrong," she bluntly states, referring directly to Ikeda (Koichi Sato, son of actor Rentaro Mikuni), a salaryman type whose wife leaves him and his young son, and who's trying to blackmail the company that downsized him into unemployment. She befriends Ritsuko (Michiyo Okutsu, formerly Daiei actress Michiyo Yasuda, very good), a world-weary bar owner living with her no-good ex-yakuza brother (Etsushi Toyokawa), and later one of the men who raped her (Kabuki actor Kankuro Nakamura, in a revelatory performance). They may all be losers, and even occasionally cruel to one another, but at least they have each other. Masako's boss (Ittoku Kishibe) at the love hotel may be a slimeball, but at least he teaches Masako how to ride a bicycle.

Undoubtedly the key expression of this comes shortly after the Kobe earthquake, when at a station coffeeshop Masako encounters a strange woman (Shungiku Uchida) who surprises her by offering Masako, a perfect stranger, to come to work with her in Kyoto. Later, it's revealed that she's Kazuko Fukuda (though listed in the credits only as "woman in coffeeshop"), the real-life fugitive who, like Masako, killed a woman and repeatedly had plastic surgery to improve her looks before finally being caught. Whether Fukuda recognizes Masako from police flyers or instinctively identifies her as a kindred spirit is never explicitly stated, but the relationship is intriguing.

Both actress Naomi Fujiyama and Sakamoto and Uno's screenplay do an excellent job creating a believable character, one that's crazy but on the surface only intermittently so. She'll appear normal for a time, if awkward, antisocial, and clumsy, only to say or do something completely bizarre, like dash out of her house wearing only slippers, or share a laugh with Ikeda only to suddenly declare, "That's enough!" For her part, Fujiyama so gets under Masako's skin it's hard to imagine what the actress is like off-camera.

Video & Audio

Face is presented in a 16:9 enhanced transfer that opens up the 1.85:1 film to 1.77:1 widescreen. The image is a bit on the soft side, but otherwise just fine. The English subtitles are optional, and viewers have the choice of Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 stereo tracks, adapted from the original DTS stereo heard in theaters.

Extra Features

The only extra is a 4:3 letterboxed trailer, which is subtitled and complete with text. Also included are 16:9 trailers for Kinji Fukasaku's Fall Guy (Kamata koshi kyoku, 1982) and Kazuo Kuroki's Ronin-gai (1990).

Parting Thoughts

Face is a fascinating character study that's almost really an ensemble piece with uniformly impressive performances. It's sad and darkly funny at the same time, with insight into the darker underbelly of Japanese society.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.