Impenetrable and confounding for all but the most acute cinephiles, Taiwanese arthouse director Tsai Ming-liang’s Visages (Face) sucked the air out of the State Theatre during its two Sydney Film Festival screenings. The 2 ½ hour film inspired more than a few walkouts, lots of exasperated groans and a smattering of impassioned applause, indicating the audience received the film with equal parts awe, disdain, bewilderment and ultimately, perhaps begrudgingly, a modicum of respect.
Introduced prior to the screening by the director and his leading man, Lee Kang-Sheng, as a 'cinematic dream", Ming-liang displayed a far more jovial, endearing bon vivant quality as a public speaker than ever comes across in his arduous film. He certainly gets the audience onside with a very funny early scene involving a burst water main in the protagonist’s apartment, but any goodwill soon evaporates when our hero, waist-deep in water (cue Jungian reference), whilst treating his ailing mother (are you there, Freud?), allows her to guide his hand inside her underwear.
Visage’s plot (which is non-linear and succumbs to the director’s wildly self-indulgent flights of visual fantasy) focuses on Hsaio-Kong, an Asian film director struggling to create a new production of Salome in Paris. There is much to distract him: his mother’s passing; a producer (Fanny Ardant) who is at her wits’ end; a leading man (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who babbles incoherently when not in a soporific state; and a repressed homosexuality that leads to a liaison with a gay hustler (Mathieu Amalric) in the bushes. Hsaio-Kong is slowly losing his mind and becomes engrossed in the myth and mystery of Salome at the expense of his sanity.
Long passages of the film are dialogue-free, and rely on abstract sound scapes or the tiniest of movements within the frame to focus the viewer’s attention. When he does give his film room to breathe, Ming-liang fumbles with some poorly-mimed dance sequences, featuring supermodel Laetitia Casta as the personification of Salome. She proves a trouper, asked to strike some very unglamourous poses as she dances in the snow, a Parisian sewer and, in a sexually-aggressive climactic number featuring plastic sheets and tomato paste (don’t ask), a meat locker.
Ming-liang declared this film his love letter to the French New Wave cinema, in particular the works of his idol, Francois Truffaut. In an all-too-brief moment of brevity, three French acting legends synonymous with that great period in cinema history - Ardant, Nathalie Baye and Jeanne Moreau – ad lib a dinner party scene. At one point, Baye lets out a raucous laugh. When this happened, it was as if a cannon had been fired in the theatre; up to that point the audience had been lulled into a stupor, such was the minimalist sound design and inaction. Briefly the audience seemed engaged, but the air of mystification and confusion soon returned.
In much the same way that New York artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films had to be seen to be believed, Visages is a fascinating experience to have endured. No doubt some critics will applaud the film’s artistic introspection, its meditative examination of the elusive nature of creativity, its ambiguous, dreamlike structure and imagery. The film uses an interesting stylistic device in the form of a field full of mirrors, perhaps to comment on the illusory nature of film as an artform or film’s value as a reflection upon society. Maybe.
But Ming-liang’s insistence on style-over-substance is the film’s undoing. Visages is so abstract, so committed to its aesthetic, it forgets the audience is watching. One of the joys of the Sydney Film Festival is that we do get to see films like Visages, because these sorts of films just don’t get released Down Under very much. Given the palpable sense of detachment and viewer frustration felt after the screening, it’s a genre not likely to be missed by Australian audiences.
(Note - Visages is the first film to be made under the 'Louvre Invites Filmmakers’ scheme, an initiative to provide the world’s filmmakers access to the great gallery and integrate art and film in new ways. )
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