The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 31
have given her a sound beating. When she moves away from the
mirror (and we as viewers realize that it was only a reflected image
we had observed), we can now see that she has deep scars on one
side of her face. Life has given her a mask that cannot be changed.
Yet she still has not lost her spirits, and in her vanity she combs her
hair so as to make life go on.
The aging process is depicted very differently. Two older women
– twin sisters – are sitting on a bench holding each other, closely
connected in an inner joy and an outer harmony. They are wearing
identically coloured bathing caps in contrast to the monotonous,
clinical white tiles of the baths. In contrast to this, some very lonely
old women are portrayed: a prostrate, cigarette-smoking woman
who seems to have resigned herself to the conditions of life; an
elderly woman trying to straighten her eyebrows and to wipe clean
her discoloured teeth in a denial of age and in an attempt to cling to
something which has disappeared.
The short film ends with an older woman walking slowly toward
the camera with the aid of a cane along a passage, the passage of
life, in a certain and inevitable journey towards death. When the
older woman reaches the end of the passage, the film ends in blackness.
The Face of Time is a very beautiful film, rich in symbolism and
masterfully executed from beginning to end.