Arie Posin’s The Face of Love is the type of film that has a dubious premise to begin with: an attractive middle-aged widow falls in love with an equally attractive middle-aged man who has more than an arresting resemblance to her former husband, who died five years ago. In fact, it’s as if her late husband had an identical twin that all of a sudden came out of nowhere.
At first sight, it may seem that such a premise does hold unlimited dramatic potential, and yet it really doesn’t. Considering how barely credible it is in realistic terms, I’d dare say the only genre that would make sense here would be melodrama — wilder, the better. Or a sci-fi film transpiring in a dystopian universe where by means of genetic manipulation there are already doubles for everyone (but that would be a different tale).
So, a naturalistic drama like the one Posin has opted for fails to make a compelling film. Think that right after meeting his late husband’s double, the widow starts a friendly relationship with him that lasts quite some weeks — but she keeps her reasons to herself and doesn’t tell him a single thing. As time goes by, they slowly begin to fall in love. To be honest, she’s still in love with her deceased husband, so technically she’s not in falling in love again with a different person. So here’s the theme of not being able to deal with loss. And all of it handled in a shallow manner.
As expected, obstacles of all sorts appear (for instance, the task of keeping him hidden from all her friends, neighbours and acquaintances is sometimes an ordeal), and in time, the romance begins to sink due to her secrecy. Still, she won’t tell the guy, even with the possibility of losing him. She keeps feeding him stupid lies. More important: how could she possibly cope with so much anxiety and emotional chaos triggered by the apparition of a man who bears the face of love?
So now you may think this is actually the stuff melodrama is made of, and you’d be partly right. Yet the dialogue isn’t that melodramatic at all. It attempts to be realistic as it’s the vehicle for pseudo-existential conversations on the meaning of who you fall in love with, who the Other really is, how much you project your object of desire, what makes an individual who he is, and also why care about anything at all if the guy looks and feels just like your loved one who’s dead and buried (as if that weren’t one hell of a traumatic situation). There’s also the issue of losing your mind over the whole affair — which is actually quite interesting in itself - and yet it’s both little explored and poorly handled.
As the writer/director is undecided as to what genre to utilize, he resorts to traits of drama and melodrama, and mixes them to ill- fated effect. Whenever he has a chance to go emotionally overboard, he pushes the brakes and goes for restraint. And when it all gets too serious, he switches to poor melodramatic gimmicks (there’s a terminal disease that’s only hinted at once and only has some dramatic weight at the very end, when you’ve already lost all interest in the storytelling), or goes along the lines of bad soap operas.
But there’s an asset, just one: Annette Bening as the widow, and Ed Harris as the double do deliver convincing performances in spite of their unconvincing characters. Don’t expect more than that.
