Early on in John Cassavetes' monumental Faces, a wildly drunk Gena Rowlands comments that John Marley "looks Freudian," even if he doesn't indulge in, nor even believes in, psychiatry. It's a strange thing to say regardless, especially to someone who you will eventually be sleeping with, but this very exchange is at the heart of Faces' power and, just maybe, Cassavetes' style in his rarely paralleled filmmaking career.

The script for Faces was birthed from a feral bitterness. The '60s had been littered with vicious verbal rows between Cassavetes and any number of Hollywood producers, ones working on the films he acted in and ones interested in the movies he was making. Like few other debuts, Shadows had caught the eye of the American independent film movement, and people wanted to work with Cassavetes -- this all being contingent on the hard-nosed director playing ball, which he was notoriously allergic to. The New York-born filmmaker took two jobs directing Hollywood fare but quickly lost the flavor when he discovered the type of people who run Hollywood. Faces was a 200-pages-plus attempt at understanding the men he had been dealing with and how they lived. What emerged was a maelstrom of frustration and deep-seeded anger.

Generally misdiagnosed as a film about a marriage that splits and the young lovers who fill the void, Cassavetes turned the story into a volatile howl at the disappointment of age and a lifetime of entitlement. When studio man Richard Forst (Marley) finally does decide to leave his wife Maria (the luminous, brilliant Lynn Carlin), it is a moment so plainspoken, you almost forget it was uttered. Does the blame rest on the pretty young thing named Jeannie (Rowlands) that Richard found one night? The argument that precipitates the couple's split drifts effortlessly from a Bergman film playing in the area to their impending demise, the only mention of infidelity being that of another couple.

As the title blatantly suggests, Cassavetes' imagery focuses on the actors' visages while the sound focuses on the elemental act of talking, sometimes for stretches that last upwards of 10 minutes. The ragged, somber Marley at turns looks both like the exquisite corpse of the studio system and a vampire who has lost his bloodlust, while Rowlands, nearly as compelling here as she would be in A Woman Under the Influence, turns a fluttery girl from Ipanema into a tirelessly inventive study in femininity. But even more fascinating are the exchanges and juxtapositions between the freewheeling Chettie, played by the immortal Seymour Cassel, and Maria.

Dancing up a storm at a local club, Chet is picked up by Maria and a gaggle of her cronies and brought home, most likely at the urging of the flock's senior member. As the senior woman becomes drunk on simply dancing with the young blood, Maria sits in patience and the other two members of the party run for cover. What happens between the two could be described, as it was in the Village Voice upon the film's release, as Warhol merging with Chekhov, but it suggests a cavernous fear that still resonates. Chet is freedom and unbridled lust, a douse of catnip in the pet store, and Maria's attempts at freeing herself from whatever life she had built with Richard is something both mesmerizing and, ultimately, catastrophic.

Faces was originally titled The Dinosaurs when it was written, but what Cassavetes hoped would be extinct by the end of the 1960s still lumbers amongst us. The answers to what Richard really feels and what Maria can really handle are as opaque as they were when the reel begins, but what they know is each other and that's where they are safe. Like Jeannie says of the handsome older man who comes home with her, Cassavetes' film looks Freudian but is ostensibly more behavioral than psychological, based in movement, language, and wild physicality rather than catharsis. A little more than 40 years later, revisiting Faces feels like simmering in disillusionment.