Word: hand-held
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...hand-held camera intrudes rudely into a Brooklyn bedroom. There, a pregnant young wife is but a few days away from the birth of her first child; she giggles as her husband presses a parfait glass to her abdomen in hopes of hearing his baby. The wife is Debbie North, a commercial artist and the sole support of her husband Bruce, a painter of unbought paintings. The people are real, and so is the rest of the cinéma-vérité film that follows their practice sessions at a natural-birth clinic and their visits...
...wants. Unfortunately, the finesse in the interrogation ends there. The camera cuts in for overly searching closeups of Curtis, whose baggy faces droops a millimeter or two as he finally coughs up the secrets of his "other self." To let even the dullest know what's happening, a hand-held camera stumbles behind the strangler re-enacting--in the psychic presence of Bottomley--one of his slayings. A few multiple image projections here, as throughout the film, serve mainly to drain whatever fear, fascination, or other emotion the strangler might evoke, reducing him to the level of a puppet dangling...
...performers are generally outstanding, especially Gena Rowlands as the call girl, John Marley as the husband and Lynn Carlin as the forlorn and suicidal wife (it is her first professional role). Cassavetes' hand-held cameras move from closeup to unsparing closeup with the agility of a spectator's shifting eye-a spectator, moreover, who must constantly feel that he is committing an invasion of privacy. It is to the film's credit that Faces evokes a slight sense of guilt: the viewer keeps watching, even when he ought to avert his eyes...
...bitterly as a discarded lover). The action is largely set against the party, usually in silent swing upstage, and much of it is filmed by a little boy with a movie camera who rejects Everyman's plea for companionship by saying, "My life's a silver screen: lots of hand-held stuff, but no adventure flicks." When Everyman misses, it does so by picking overeasy targets to snipe at: American dream complacency, religious hypocrisy, etc. But as in Mayer's Midsummer Night's Dream the reinterpretation of type is often shocking, always cunning. The archetypal morality play proves a perfect...
...perhaps less an homage to Hitchcock than Truffaut's own attempts at working Hitchcock-style, planning every shot and cut in advance of the shooting. Coutard's claustrophobic framing suggests "plan-sequence," sketches of shots realized by the camera, and there are no traces of the nouvelle vague hand-held technique of Truffaut's films through Soft Skin. A shot will follow a telephone wire in close-up through two rooms, stopping briefly at a closeup of the phone, then dollying into a medium close shot of the victim, unaware his phone wire has been severed. In this respect...