On what makes Cassavetes' Faces (1968) different from any other film about a marriage.

Faces was shot over three years with borrowed equipment and unpaid actors, in Cassavetes' own house. The formal constraints of the production — 16mm film, documentary lighting, real locations — are inseparable from the film's subject, which is the discomfort of watching people who are not performing but are not quite real either.

The film follows a middle-class couple through a night of mutual infidelity: he goes to a call girl, she goes home with a young man from a party. The film watches each encounter with a patience that is almost painful: the conversations are long, the silences are longer, the behavior is recognizably human in ways that scripted performance usually isn't.

Cassavetes hired professional actors but directed them to abandon technique. He wanted behavior rather than performance. The result is something that looks improvised but was extensively rehearsed — rehearsed specifically to achieve the quality of behavior rather than the quality of performance.

What Faces captures about marriage that almost no other film does is the specific quality of intimacy between two people who know each other very well and have run out of things to say: the familiarity that has become its own kind of distance.