Contra Costa Times,
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Cassandra Braun: STARING AGE RIGHT IN THE FACE
Here's a scary thought: Imagine spending the day having a video camera carefully scour and zoom in on the contours, wrinkles, sags, bags and bumps of your face. Now, imagine subjecting yourself to this at age 50 or 60.
That's exactly what a group of Berkeley women did for the documentary "Let's Face It," screening Sunday at the Livermore Film Festival, and Saturday as part of the Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema in San Francisco.
The 25-minute film is a funny and poignant discussion among a group of friends, ages 45 to 60, about aging, their features and the pressures of a society that tells them not to "look their age."
"One day we went to lunch and one woman said, 'People tell me I look tired, but I don't feel tired. Do you think these bags and sags are too much, and that I ought to get a face lift?'
"But we also began to say things about our feelings about having an older face after having lived a whole lifetime with having a younger face. And we thought this is really worthwhile, this conversation we were beginning. So one of the women said, 'Well, we ought to make a video of this because the conversation was so good.' "More than three years and 75 hours of footage later, the three produced "Let's Face It," which premiered at the Albany Library last spring and won an award for most inspiring film at the Santa Cruz Film Festival in June.
SLOW DOWN AND LOOK When we meet at Oser's North Berkeley home, she, Levinson (who celebrated her 75th birthday that day) and Aspasia Neophytos, 59, one of the women interviewed in the film, sit around her pine kitchen table. It is the kind of conversation that we are privy to in this film. “I’ve always liked myself, despite," Neophytos pauses. “Despite being who you are," Oser playfully chimes in. Everyone laughs.
"Other people like you, too, despite who you are," Levinson adds. “But even if you like yourself, you don't like everything about yourself. That's always the case. So it was very intense," recalls Neophytos. "I have never experienced that before, that kind of amazement at how ... well all those lines and wrinkles were just too much, just too much. But it was a good beginning to what happened after that."
"What happens next is that people slow down and really look," says Oser. And from that, she explains, the women started to see beyond the knee-jerk criticism and to come to terms with who they are. “It’s like you turned around, you looked at it, and it had lost all its sting and you move on," explains Neophytos. "And in fact, you gain youth somehow."
DO WHAT YOU MUST "The interesting thing about the screenings is that after watching it, people in the audience will just start talking honestly about themselves in a room of largely strangers, in exactly the same way that the women in the film do," says Levinson. "Including, there will be at least one 82-year-old who'll get up and say, 'I love the way I look! I feel just fine about it.' "In the film, the women talk about the double standard in aging for men versus women. "Women have wrinkles, men have character lines," says one. Yet, Levinson says men are the fastest growing demographic seeking plastic surgery. Oser too recounts a story she read about the trend in men seeking reconstructive surgery to compete with younger job applicants. And at screenings, for every 10 women in the audience, there is always one very sympathetic man.
Unlike many films on aging and appearance, "Let's Face It" simply gives viewers permission to do what they need to do. Says Levinson: "We hope that the message is that it's OK to do whatever you want about aging, just think about it more deeply than watching an ad."
