Faces is unflinching in its portrayal of the things we do for love. Intimate, cruel and loving, its grinning close-ups infinitely sad, it is the night-long journey to the epicenter of a marriage on the rocks. A Los Angeles business executive (John Marley) is jarred out of complacency in his fourteen-year marriage and spends the night with a call-girl (Gena Rowlands). His wife (Lynn Carlin) picks up a friendly young stud (Seymour Cassel) at a discotheque; in the morning she attempts suicide. The film represents a labor of love by the artists, which is what it takes to create the feel of improvisation, of life captured unawares-the lie in a laugh or the truth in an averted glance. The marriage bust-up comes almost mid-chuckle, so ingrained are the habits of co-habitation. As Richard Roud wrote for the New York Film Festival, "Cassavetes stays with his tormented, alienated characters until they break through the other side of slice-of-life naturalism into emotional and artistic truth." Ray Carney offers a different viewpoint: "While the (film's) style offers expansions of attention, continuous shifts of tone and feeling, and multiple points of view, the characters represent limitations and constraints on consciousness...However doomed, (Cassavetes' characters) are still smarter, more passionate, more creative than almost any other figures in all of film." In winning five Venice Film Festival awards, this was not Cassavetes' first film to gain international recognition, but, nominated for three Academy Awards, it represents a breakthrough as the first American independent feature to reach a national audience.