Reading Faces, by Danish author Tove Ditlevsen, almost inevitably suggests a dialogue with one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema of the last century. I mean Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. The novel and film not only share a period (the novel was published in 1968; the film is from 1966) and a setting (Scandinavian in both cases), but they also share something much deeper and more relevant: establishing themselves as two works. madness in women Moreover, their similarities are not simply due to the fact that they share the same cultural climate, that particular status quo of the Scandinavian countries’ relationship to what we might call the problem of identity, but rather abound in a very specific direction. This singularity has to do with the novel and film sharing a vision of the face as a residue of human passions and their conflicts. Any viewer who’s seen Persona will remember that Bergman subjected the faces of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson to such fascinating, sometimes almost obscene, scrutiny that they turned them into ambassadors of all that an image could provide us with. Similarly, Ditlevsen organizes the complex narrative material of Las caras around what is on constant display, quite literally, akin to the late-night journey of a woman whose physical and moral foundations have been shaken. human face.
Lise, the protagonist of Las caras, is a children’s literature writer who lives in an obsession with the image that every face gives and at the same time every face hides. Aware that our face is a mirror but also a mask, her analyzes of physicality create a nightmarish aura that is sometimes unbearable, she. Fake faces hidden under real faces, removable faces, faces of children who already carry the face of the old man they will one day be with, faces that accumulate and annihilate each other as in an endless palimpsest, faces that match the geological structure. entity layer. Just as a book may have several editions, each of us can be reproduced over and over in secret archives of desire and pain. One piece, among others, serves to highlight this rugged landscape of appearance and gesture: “His thoughts are like someone rummaging through a drawer with something he hasn’t used for a long time, Dr. He searched Jorgensen’s face. He found her beneath many other faces and looked at him with horror. It was long, straight, and endless, like a representation of the law that two parallel lines never intersect.” Las caras ultimately paradoxically made us, one and plural, always missing, never from every surface that stranger, the world with whom we live every day, uses to contain and reflect us. makes a fascinating analysis of the same person who is not fixed, thinking.