And speaking of E's exquisite face, this looks to be an interesting show. I'm praying my cheap Yankee cable TV gets the Learning Channel.
August 25, 2001
TELEVISION REVIEW | 'THE HUMAN FACE'
Taking a Rare Stroll Through Facial History
By NEIL GENZLINGER
ll members of People Against
Punning, look away now. "The
Human Face," a four- hour series tomorrow
and Monday on the Learning Channel,
simply demands to be described as cheeky.
That is largely because it is narrated by John
Cleese, who tackles this odd subject by
mixing the fearless humor of his "Monty
Python" days with what seems to be a
genuine curiosity. The result is a very
informative, very entertaining, very different
program that hardly seems like a
documentary at all.
Mr. Cleese is aided by an assortment of
experts and celebrities, principally Elizabeth
Hurley, who is his straight woman and,
sometimes, his example: in Part 1, a
miniaturized Mr. Cleese strolls across Ms.
Hurley's face, using it to make his points.
This first hour, called "Beauty," looks not
just at people who are good looking but at
why we think they. It talks about the
universal rules of beauty, noting a study in
which people from a variety of cultures,
given a collection of photographs and told to
rank them from most beautiful to least, put
the pictures in virtually the same order.
And it talks about symmetry. "Ever wonder
why top athletes tend to be good looking?"
Mr. Cleese asks. It's because an athlete's face is usually symmetrical; one
side is the same as the other, a balance that is reflected in the rest of the
body and enables the person to, say, run faster. We find symmetry attractive,
primordially so. As one expert puts it, "When you detect something
asymmetrical, it's no longer attractive, and you don't want to mate with it."
But of course, there is much more to the face and our ideas of beauty than
that, as made clear in the subsequent installments. Part 2, "Fame," is
especially full of fascinating notions about the impact of the popular press,
movies and television.
"Until quite recently," Mr. Cleese says, "if you were famous, you were
powerful" — that is, your power was what made you famous, and it didn't
matter what you looked like because there was no way for most people to
see you close up. In fact, we're told, until 1500 or so, leaders would have
any face put on coins and in paintings that bore their names, because who
would know the difference?
Now, of course, especially with the advent of the movie close-up, a good-
looking face alone can bring fame. It's discombobulating because, as the
program says, "our brains are still operating on the idea that fame is
something you earn." Thus we look to talk shows and celebrity magazines for
words of wisdom from the beautiful famous people, but, alas, they're no
smarter than we are.
All of this is served with lots of levity, incongruously plunked in among the
more traditional documentary style. During the discussion of fame, for
instance, we get a Pythonesque scene of Renaissance-era paparazzi: Mr.
Cleese and Ms. Hurley, dressed as the upper crust of the day, emerge from
their grand home for a few moments of waving while painters sketch madly
and yell for them to pose this way or that.
Perhaps most remarkable about this inventive series, though, is that its best
moments aren't zany at all. The program pauses occasionally to talk to
people with maladies of the face, some of them difficult to look at — a man
with facial cancer; a young girl whose face cannot vary in expression; a man
who has lost the ability to recognize faces, including those of his children. Mr.
Cleese here shows himself to be a sensitive but not condescending
interviewer, another surprise from a man who has given us many over the
years.
THE HUMAN FACE
Learning Channel, Sunday night at 9 |
