Old as all time

How do you compose a film out of a single human face? In I've Loved You So Long, my guess is that the face came first, then the movie. Kristen Scott Thomas's face looks like it was carved out of stone with a blunt knife, then weathered for a time longer than that of natural human existence. It is so striking that it interrupts every scene in the first half without doing anything, and seems to provide frictive counterpoint to the lives around her - they are drawn into the deep recesses of her cheeks, the strong bone of her brow, her secret past. The camera knows this and stays close, allowing her gargoyle-like features to fill our vision, so that it is hard for us to see much else. A moment of wonder: in a montage of family scenes that show the beginning of a process of healing, her face is no longer central, but is simply one of many in the backdrop of a circling crowd. The memory of pain never disappears - but it can be overcome, and momentarily forgotten, by an outpouring of joy.

The face is not a symbol in the movie, or a part of it - it is the movie. It begins in the high, narrow arch of the nose, and splays outward in either direction across vast cheeks, pushing the pallid, sunken skin to its farthest point at the edges of the eyes. Looking at Thomas makes you realize that there must be something in our faces that holds the eyes, nose, mouth in close proximity, in more or less fixed distance from each other, because she lacks it. Her features spill out, barely contained by the edges of her face. Contrast this with her sister, aquiline, narrow, small. They look so much like sisters, not because they are the same, but because they together complete a universe.

You can see every day lived in the collective vision of a face, and though you may try to dissemble, your face will reveal what you yourself do not know to the most piercing gaze. When the face is this striking, you can only wonder at the life that passed before it, what it exacted and what it left in its ruin.