The Mad Genius of Gena Rowlands in Two Defining Performances

There is something fascinating about watching Rowlands through Cassavetes’s lens, first as the rakish escort Jeannie, and then as middle-aged mother Sarah, both of whom seem to wander like lost souls onto and off the screen, guided by Cassavetes’s uniquely theatrical hand. A viewer might almost imagine the two characters as the same person, separated by 15 years and the endless daily tribulations of aging, debauchery, and love.

Faces is undoubtedly the cooler and more formally inventive of the two films: a black-and-white piece of handheld vérité that skitters and slithers in and out of middle-class living rooms, bars, and nightclubs. The film’s style is reflected in Rowlands’s New Wave-inspired demoiselle, similar to Anna Karina’s sex worker in Vivre sa vie or Bernadette Lafont’s shop girl in Les bonnes femmes.

In his recent ode to Rowlands, film critic Peter Bradshaw distinguished her turn as Jeannie in Faces as “a subtler and more difficult-to-read performance” than her later, career-defining role in A Woman Under the Influence. Her obliqueness might be due, in part, to the way Jeannie always seems to be in motion. Although she appears in only half of the film, her dynamism, more desperate than youthful, propels the male characters around her like billiard balls. She is always running in and out of rooms, threatening her rambunctious “suitors” before suddenly breaking into drunken laughter and singing along with them.

“Jeannie, do me a favor. Don’t be silly anymore. Just be yourself,” her wounded client/lover Richard demands after they have slept together and she has prepared him breakfast in bed. “But I am myself,” she answers. “Who else would I be?” It is only when Cassavetes’s handheld camera moves in for a closeup that the momentary stillness of her face reveals the runny mascara or faraway gaze of a woman deeply wounded by the desires of men.