Face explodes with the passions and obsessions of its maker

On the night of September 22, the National Concert Hall, for the first time since its establishment in 1987, was turned into a venue to show film, with nearly 2,000 viewers jamming into the musical compound for the premiere of Tsai Ming-liang’s latest feature—Face, or Visage in French.

It was a rare visual experience and there was laughter during the showing. The images were so spectacular and magnetic that I felt sad to see the 2.5-hour film coming to an end at around 10 p.m. Then thunderous roars of applause brought Tsai onto the stage. The director was overwhelmed with emotion and said that he wanted to share the honor with the land and people of Taiwan.

The Louvre’s first film collection

A successful collaboration with artists, musicians, and writers will lead to a shake up viewers’ perceptions of the role of museums, when the world-renowned Louvre Museum in Paris commissioned Tsai in 2005 with the objective of bringing cinema into the museum’s collection.

Face will be officially added to the art collections of the 216-year-old institute in May 2010. The film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year.

Face is an international co-production led by French producers Jacques Bidou and Marianne Bumoulin of JBA Production with Taipei’s Homegreen, the Louvre Museum, Belgium’s Tarantula, Holland’s Circle Films and Arte France Cinema. It features Tsai’s frequent protagonists Lee Kang-sheng, Yang Kui-mei, Chen Hsiang-chi, and France’s top acting talents that played the lead role in Fran çois Truffaut’s films, including Jean-Pierre L éaud, Jeanne Moreau, Fanny Ardant, along with famous French model and actress Laetitia Casta. The film’s stunning wardrobe was made by top French designer Christian Lacroix.

The film, in Tsai’s own words, presents the illusions of life, and is his quest into the inspiration and values that were lost in time. “Face, in a sense, is my attempt to call back the soul of the dead,” Tsai said during a talk on September 22. “The problem facing art films is that the box office drives the movie industry and it’s been impossible for art films to survive.”

On one level, the film reflects Tsai’s experiences in the West. “Every time I leave Chinese territory, I feel like I am mute,” he said. “I have to rely on visuals and still be able to find my way around. I rely on my sense of smell.”

Face is a film within a film that tells the story of a Taiwanese director (played by Lee Kang-sheng) who goes to the Louvre to shoot a film on the myth of Salom é. The part of King Herod goes to L éaud, while Laetitia Casta is chosen to play the princess. The chaotic production risks coming to a total halt when the director returns to Taipei because his mother is dying, and his producer (played by Fanny Ardant) tries hard to fix the situation.

Henri Loyrette, the president and director of the Louvre Museum, said: “What Tsai Ming-liang shows – people wandering in the great gallery or dining in the Napoleon III Salon -– is not at all strange or foreign to the vocation of the palace.”

“The Louvre has great theatrical potential and Tsai creates fictions that could have occurred here, inspired by the very nature of our collections, with their great themes.”

Loyrette said he was very happy that Tsai did not make Face a documentary of the Louvre; instead, he looked into the concept of time and aesthetics and made a very outstanding introduction to the museum. Viewers only get to see the paintings of the Louvre in the second scene from the last, Loyrette revealed. “It was like the Louvre exists in the film, yet it is invisible.”

Filmmaking for Tsai

Tsai said he did not “dream” to be a filmmaker, but film really chose him.
“Filmmaking is too painful a process for me, mentally and physically, but I always find myself in the films that I make, and this empowers me to keep doing it.”

The themes that Tsai constantly deals with, such as loneliness, isolation, loss and disappearance, the failure of erotic desire, the dark corners of mind, and illness, are all about his feelings and understanding of life. “Filmmaking is a very personal and private thing, and it should not be treated just as pure entertainment for the viewers.”

He writes his scripts like poetry---short, only containing instructions on how to make the films. There is no dialogue for the actors, but he communicates a lot with the actors so that when they are shooting, they know how to verbalize their characters. This style lets actors experience life and act in the film, he said. “I wait and the actors act naturally, this is the best technique.”

“My actors are not like Hollywood actors who are taught how to speak and act. They seem like real people, and they don’t look like they were acting.”

Born into an ethnic Chinese family in Malaysia in 1958, Tsai moved to Taiwan to attend university. After working in Taiwanese theater and television and writing a number of screenplays in the Hong Kong film industry, he started to write and direct his own films.

His films swept through major film festivals in the 1990s, starting with his first Rebels of the Neon God [Qing shaonnian na zha] (1993), which won best director and actor prizes at the Nantes Festival des Trois Continents in 1994 and introduced actor Lee Kang-sheng, his constant collaborator and now a Taiwanese "second wave" icon.

Tsai's second film, Vive l'Amour [Aiqing wansui] (1994), won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival. The River [He liu] (1997) won second prize at the Berlin, Singapore, and Chicago film festivals. In 1998 the Chicago Film Festival jury presented a Golden Hugo award to The Hole [Dong] for best feature. His 2003 creation Goodbye, Dragon Inn bagged the Fipresci Award at the Venice Film Festival and has entered both the Chicago and New York Film Festivals. He picked up the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement for The Wayward Cloud at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival. Face was Tsai’s 10th film and was dedicated to his mother.

The French encounter

Tsai described the fated encounter between himself and French director Fran çois Truffaut, saying that he loves all of the actors and actresses that appear in Truffaut’s films, and that it was Truffaut who gave him the “face” of L éaud.

Tsai considers Truffaut’s The 400 Blows the most classic film in history. For him, the last scene with the young face of the protagonist (played by L éaud) has been unforgettable. So when the Louvre approached him for a film on the Louvre, the first thought that jumped to his mind was to create an epic encounter between the two faces that had most enchanted him—that of L éaud’s and Lee’s.

“I had always wanted to work with L éaud, but didn’t know how,” he said, “during the film shooting, every one just followed him.”

Tsai said the French really love and show respect for the medium of film and filmmaking, and he was allowed great freedom and received much help when shooting in the Louvre.

French actress Fanny Ardant flew all the way from France to Taipei for a scene that had to be shot at a tiny apartment in Taipei. “She was very professional,” said Tsai. “And in her 80s, Jeanne Moreau is still very beautiful and very self-confident.”

He also found Laetitia Casta to be very smart and penetrative and the male protagonist, Lee, who has the most scenes with Casta, undaunted despite the language barrier.

“We observed each other a lot,” said Lee. “Actors become sharply attentive when language is a problem; they seem to be more inspired and expressive.”

Like a museum

Lin Wen-chi, associate professor of the Department of English at National Central University, said that Face explores the limits of film and probes into its essence.

“Face exists in the gaps between the scenes, life and death, truth and untold truth, what’s shown and what’s not shown, and almost exclusively, people react to the unknown as they do when faced with their own fears and urges.”

The film works as a symbolism and a theory expressed as an art form—an idea rendered physically. The main idea, as it always is in Tsai, is of people trying to isolate themselves in parallel worlds and of those worlds breaking through.

“Tsai collects in a single film all the actors and actresses he likes, as well all the scenes that they acted before and piece them together in that single film. In a way, Face functions like a museum, and that’s really impressive.”

Face will be in wide release in Taiwan on October 2.