Plot
The film, shot in cinéma vérité-style, depicts the final stages of the disintegrating marriage of a middle-aged couple. We are introduced to various groups and individuals the couple interacts with after the husband, Richard Forst's (John Marley), sudden statement of his desire for a divorce. Afterwards, Richard spends the night in the company of brash businessmen and prostitutes, the wife with her middle-aged female friends and an aging, free-associating playboy they've picked up at a bar. The night proceeds as a series of tense conversations and confrontations occur, illustrating where the modern American lifestyle has failed to nourish the interests, love lives, and emotional/spiritual fulfillment of these characters. Nearly everyone we meet expresses deep dissatisfaction with their lives and also a resigned attitude to this malaise. The film offers little hope, only a suggestion that in this world merely understanding that we're unhappy or dissatisfied is a revelation.
Read more about this topic: Faces (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)