Жүзсіздің әлемі Бетперделер қоғамы

1966 Japanese New Wave film by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Engineer Okuyama's face was disfigured by an explosion in an industrial accident, and wears bandages to cover the burns. Feeling isolated and being physically rejected by his wife, he consults a psychiatrist. Seeing the frustration Mr. Okuyama experiences with his facial disfiguration, the psychiatrist proposes to make an experimental prosthetic mask for him, apparently with great reluctance. The psychiatrist and Okuyama offer a man 10,000 yen to serve as the model for the mask, and the mask is built and fitted onto Okuyama. The psychiatrist demands that Okuyama regularly reports his sensations and thoughts to him, and cautions Okuyama that the mask may change his behavior and personality so much that he will cease to be the same person. Okuyama tells no one that he has received the mask, and simply lives as a new man, telling his wife that he is traveling on business while he rents an apartment nearby. He tests the mask's effectiveness on a secretary of his company, who doesn't recognize him, and a mentally challenged neighborhood girl, who does. During a meeting between Okuyama and the psychiatrist, the latter realizes that his patient has already changed, and imagines a world where the mask goes into mass production, subsequently eliminating all sense of morality. Okuyama decides to seduce his wife using his new identity. When he obtains this too easily, full of rage, he reveals himself to her, who in turn says she had known about his true identity from the first moment. He tries to persuade her to give their relationship another chance, but she rejects him. Later, Okuyama attempts to rape a woman on the street, claiming to be nobody when arrested. He is freed thanks to his psychiatrist (whose business card the police found in Okuyama's pocket), who testifies that Okuyama is his patient and that he is not violent. While walking the nightly streets together, the two see that everyone on the street is wearing a mask. At first the psychiatrist asks Okuyama for the mask back, then lets him keep it, as he is a free man. While shaking hands to say goodbye, Okuyama stabs him to death. Interweaved throughout the film is a separate tale (present in Abe's original novel in the form of a movie the protagonist watches at a cinema and then recounts) of a young woman whose otherwise beautiful face suffered a severe disfigurement on the right cheek and right side of the neck. She works in a psychiatric ward, whose inmates include many World War II veterans, and lives with her brother. The imagery of these sequences, her repeated worry about the coming of another war, and her asking her brother if he still remembers the sea at Nagasaki (presumably from their childhood there), all suggest that her scars came as a result of the atomic bombing of that city. Like Okuyama, she feels isolated because of her disfigurement.

One recurring image is the large and small severed ears which appear in the scenery in several scenes. These ears were designed and sculpted by Japanese sculptor Tomio Miki.

The Face of Another had a roadshow on July 15, 1966, in Japan, where it was distributed by Toho. The film received general release in Japan on September 23, 1967. In 2008, film scholar Alexander Jacoby called it "a flawed fantasy" whose interesting theme suffers from the protagonist's "bland characterization." The film has since improved its critical standing. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 100% approval rating based on 7 reviews, with an average rating of 7.5/10. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader defended the film in his 2005 review, calling it "more palatable" than Teshigahara's previous works, the theme "brilliantly and imaginatively explored," and the acting "potent."

The Face of Another received two Mainichi Film Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Film Score.