Face off

REMEMBER that film Face/Off in which John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s characters swapped faces? One was an FBI man, the other was a terrorist.

Travolta was given Cage’s face – and vice-versa – so the good guy could infiltrate the bad guy’s gang to find out where he’d planted a bomb.

I was reminded of this while watching The Man With Someone Else’s Face. Terrorists and the FBI aren’t involved, but several men and several faces are.

Dr Guo Shuzhong is one of China’s most celebrated plastic surgeons with ambitions to perform the world’s first full face transplant. He’s already performed animal experiments and successfully achieved a rabbit face transplant.

By this time the scenario was sounding like a particularly nasty horror movie. So it’s a good thing we’re reminded that, in November 2005, Isabelle Dinoire had the world’s first partial face transplant.

Her life is now “virtually back to normal”

although she gets recognised in the street, which must be odd if you’re not wearing your own face.

She’s the right type of patient, as her surgeon puts it, because she lives near the hospital and goes for regular checkups and psychological support.

Dr Guo Shuzhong has picked the wrong type of patient – a man from a remote part of Yunnan province who was attacked by a black bear.

For the first time, 30-year-old Li leaves his village for the big city and the prospect of a partial face transplant. He’s asked if he’s worried that the donor face is from a dead person. “If he was afraid of ghosts it would be a problem,” says his doctor. His patient is satisfied after being told it’s like using old clothes to repair damaged clothing.

The operation goes well. Li spends 14 months in hospital, but tires of city life and, against medical advice, returns to his family in his remote home. The doctor tries to dissuade him because he needs lifelong care and the drugs he must take can have serious side effects.

Sure enough, two years after the operation news comes that Li’s face is being rejected. He is literally losing face. Photographs confirm this. But he refuses to return to the hospital.

Dr Guo journeys to see him and is shocked by what he sees. “Oh my God, what happened to you?,” he asks on seeing his patient, who’s refusing to take his life-saving drugs and has lost a lot of weight.

This is bad news, too, for the surgeon’s plan to perform the world’s first full face transplant on a 36-year-old engineer, He, who was badly burnt in a fire.

Some idea of his look can be gauged from hearing his son report that, when they were in the park, another terrified child hid behind his mother and shouted “monster”.

Now he must wait for the operation while hospital authorities decide if, in the light of Li’s troubles, they will allow Dr Guo to proceed with his full face transplant.

In the meantime, we can debate the moral and ethical questions that such transplants raise.

WILL we ever be able to look at Griff Rhys Jones in the same light after his two-part film last year, On Anger, in which he showed himself a very angry not-so-young man? Not so much grumpy as furious.

Hopefully, he’ll keep his feelings in check in Restoration Revisited, as he gets passionate about old architecture. He looks back at some of the buildings which have featured in the series, which debuted in 2003.

It saw Jones spotlighting the plight of some of this country’s finest buildings which were facing ruin because of a lack of money to maintain them.

The presenter returned in 2005 to give a much-needed update on how the refurbishment of the victorious buildings was progressing (or, in some cases, wasn’t), before jogging our memories about other important landmarks under threat.

Here, Jones is back to urge us to keep an eye on the sometimes hidden architectural glories surrounding us, as well as lifting the lid on what has happened to the winning properties in the past three years.