Visage

The film is obviously made as an art black comedy and though it has almost no plot it consists of highly surreal scenes roughly based on Salome by Oscar Wilde – the main stress is made on the stupendous camera work. Oscar Wilde's symbolism in Visage is lifted to the level of paranoia. The director shooting the drama may also be considered as John the Baptist – pay your special attention at his constant misfortune with water and episode with the man in bushes looks like an absurdist mockery of biblical rite of John baptising Christ. In the final scene however Salome dances not for King Herod but for the symbolically severed head of John the Baptist. "Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth."

Famed Taiwanese auteur Ming-liang Tsai ventures into France to deliver a love poem to the works of Truffaut in the form of an opaque slow- flowing visual poem, devoid of a conventional story, instead harbouring its message of collages of images. The slight frame of the script focuses on the filming of a movie by a foreign director (Kang-sheng Lee), arguably the most proclaimed participant of a quasi-plot. Intertwining with him are the cast and crew of the movie, with Truffaut's favourite actor Jean- Pierre Léaud as the lead man, Fanny Ardent as the film's producer and Laetitia Casta as the co-star.

"Visage" however detaches itself from indulging into a flowing story to tell, instead building the entire movie around carefully designed set- pieces with jump from image to image. The camera is mostly static, peering in from the outside on the actions of the cast, as if eavesdropping and voyeuristically capturing the moment. However, whatever happens outside these moments is irrelevant, forcing the viewer to arduously fill in the dots, a task that in the movies taxing runtime may prove too strenuous for most viewers, even to the cinephile crowd so in love with the odd and unexpected.

The movies is constructed from these captured moving images, slow shots with little to no dialogue with moments of musical outbursts, when characters lip-sync to various songs. Several moments have you especially captivated, the highlight being in the beginning sequences, when a static camera peers into the director's kitchen and observes his futile attempts to clog a drain, finally resigning to the inevitable and resting at his mother's bedside in an awkward quasi-incestuous scene. These wackier, off-beat scenes manage to liven up the otherwise laborious proceedings, but the movie shifts focus slowly to more darker imagery with a sexual culmination in a abattoir as eerily disgusting as it was distasteful. Each such scene of this fragmented movie lasts several minutes, thus utterly deflating a casual viewer and even leaving the more auteur crowd grasping at straws to admire. The imagery is at times starkly captivating, with certain moments fully worth the watch from a purely aesthetic point of view. Nonetheless the visual side in itself fails to engulf for vast periods of time, instead capturing imagination on-and-off.

The entire movie is also unfortunately a black box, which requires all the appropriate background input to deliver any type of understanding to the ongoings. The type of movie where any self-respecting film critic would never dare say that he failed to understand the references and symbolism, thus giving him an intellectual ordeal to paste together the scenes. Thankfully the long scenes offer apt possibilities to contemplate each passing portrait, given you don't nod off in the midst. Personally I felt lost in translation, even if vast elements struck a cord, the overall message remained an enigma, not helped by my attention constantly dropping in-and-out of the movie. As such I can fully understand certain auteurs finding the viewing a hard-worked pleasure, but overall I hold the firm belief that whereas movies should be challenging, they should also not require the audience to strain to just keep awake during the watch. As a medium it needs to be engaging, not a painful chore, pure artistry and intellectual proficiency is not enough.

I saw this film during a festival in which all of Ming-liang Tsai's feature films were shown over a two-week period. Tsai and Kang-shen Lee were in town for some of the time, and came to the showing to give an introduction, through a translator of course. They spoke for a few minutes about themselves and their relation to the film. Perhaps indicative of Tsai's small fanbase, only 40 people attended even though the room could easily hold 150. It felt quite special to see the two together on stage in such an intimate setting.

Kang-shen Lee started off, recalling that Paris was very cold when they were filming there, and that they ate really good food every night. Each course might take half an hour, whereas when filming in Taiwan they would just chow down a bento box. He also fondly remembered having his picture taken with the Mona Lisa without other visitors around, a perk of filming in the Louvre. He explained that in the film, he played Ming-liang Tsai.

Ming-liang Tsai's remarks went deeper. He said that when he saw Truffaut's 'Les quatre cents coups', just after he moved from Malaysia to Taiwan, it really opened his eyes. When he was in Paris filming 'What time is it there' he contacted some of Truffaut's actors, which is how Jean-Pierre Léaud got to play a small role in that film. As a young man, Tsai had never imagined one day working with Léaud. For 'What time is it there', Tsai had Kang in Taiwan, and Léaud in Paris. For his film he got the two actors together. He also said filming was a very happy time for him, feeling the close proximity to the Louvre.

Tsai went on to explain that 'Visage' is really a self-portrait, a film about his innermost emotions. Almost apologetically, he said it would be a difficult movie to understand because of that. But, he said, he realizes most of his films are hard to understand.

Knowing that the film is essentially a self-portrait gave it a lot of context. It is indeed a film that is hard to grasp. Yes, there is a story, but more than that is it a collection of imagery and symbolism that is very meaningful to Tsai himself. He probably made the film much more for himself than for any audience. Armed with this knowledge, I could easily give up trying to understand the film, and just experience it as a view into the man.

The film contains themes, symbols and imagery that I have seen across his body of work. To name a few: Water running, leaking, dripping. Tape to shut out light. The death of a parent. Sex, implied incest. A fishtank. A cooking pot. Very specific shots of a typical high-rise apartment in Taiwan. There were other free-form scenes that no doubt are very personal to Tsai.

Also, there was a very interesting moment during the showing. At a point, there is a tracking shot of an actor, who is half submerged in water in an underground tunnel. The shot is in black and white, there is no sound. As the camera tracks, it stays trained on the actor. The camera rig moves sideways, in between the light source and the actor, so the cameraman becomes visible as a shadow superimposed over the actor and the wall behind. It felt like being pulled backwards, away from the action, towards the cameraman. At this moment, a spotlight was illuminated in the back of the theatre, in the same line as the camera and actor. It felt like being pulled further backwards, out of the film and into the theatre. It was amazing how the focus of my attention was shifted from the actor, to the camera, to the audience, because it was so unexpected. After a few seconds the light dimmed again and the film continued normally.

I don't know if I would recommend this film to anyone, unless they want to get a look into the maker's head. I think films such as 'Stray Dogs' or 'Vive l'Amour' are more enjoyable, but as with all of his work, you really have to be into slow cinema to enjoy them.

Visage is one of those movies that it's hard to parallel. Some films that particular scenes reminded me of were Matthew Barney's Cremaster 5, Peter Kennedy's Flux Film 37 and Godard's Pierrot Le Fou, but Tsai's style really seems to sit away from what everyone else is doing.

Visage follows the production of a film maudit, directed by Kang, a Taiwanese director who has come to Paris. It's definitely a film of fragments, the story is hard to follow because it's clear that quite a lot of it occurs between scenes, even within scenes action often occurs offshot. As a viewer I felt like an interloper, because the camera is often tight in a corner or outside of the room where action occurs. It's as if Tsai wants to shun the viewer, to emphasise the distance between a viewer/voyeur's comprehension and what is taking place. As a comparison, Flux Film 37 is a short film where a man sits in front of a camera, chewing gum with a frown on his face, carefully sticking transparencies onto the camera until finally nothing is visible, an act of defiance against the viewer. As well as perhaps shooting in this spirit, one of the characters (Laetitia Casta the supermodel playing Salomé in the movie within the movie) also starts taping herself up from view, blacking out a window until the shot goes black and taping up her mirror slowly and deliberately. I also felt this was a kind of dark metaphor, of a loss of innocence, of a person's transformation from being a public creature interested in life and self-exploratory, to a sexual entity, closed off, lolling in a lust-sty.

Although the film contains no violence or sex (at one point a sexual act is performed off frame), it's probably one of the most hard to watch films I've seen in a while, where a film director is falling apart mentally, a slave to his bizarre vision and his lustful impulses. Violent shots include Kang stood by the side of a snow machine, letting it obliterate his face from view and his eyes from seeing and an actor covered in bandages with the smell of food tantalisingly wafting into his nostrils.

A funerary conflagration, flesh balls splatchering in a pan, the Producer (Fanny Ardant) whispering key information inaudibly into Antoine's (Jean-Pierre Leaud) ear, are nihilistic affronts to the viewer.

Whilst the film is dark, there are moments of supremely ironic musical and slapstick interludes, which you can either choose to laugh with or be appalled by depending on your whim.

Ultimately the film appears almost an act of self-immolation, a shot of a universe where people are mere meat prey to lustful impulses, unable to look beyond the surface or the face of things. Tsai here takes more than a little of the taste of Rivette's l'amour par terre (1984), in both movies directors portrayed as sole initiates in mysteries that they control. This went down like a stone at Cannes, perhaps deservedly - repulsion an appropriate response. It is however a film of extreme visual and technical competence that I was greedy for and which provoked a lot of thought.