[FILM REVIEW] The stag always arrives at its destination

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For his newest film, Face (臉), Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) prowled the insides of the Louvre with the aid of an art student and the museum’s fireman. It was a time of great anxiety and stress for Tsai, who had to cope with the loss of his mother to cancer in the middle of the three-year-long filmmaking process, before he had even finished the script.

Face was commissioned by the Louvre as the first project under an initiative in which the museum is giving access to its premises to a group of directors and partially funding the movies they film there. It reflects Tsai’s grief and personal frustrations as disclosed through stunning images and inexplicable events that are linked by imagination and association rather than narrative connections, blurring the boundary between reality and dreams. In a sense, the film is itself a dream in which Tsai performs rituals to summon up the ghosts of his late mother and French auteur Francois Truffaut, to whom the Malaysia-born director pays tribute with Face.

More obscure and discursive than the director’s previous works, Face is about a Taiwanese director shooting a film about the myth of Salome at the Louvre — audiences need to be familiar with the myth to grasp the point. The vaguely defined storyline begins with the director, Hsiao Kang (played by Tsai’s alter-ego Lee Kang-sheng, 李康生), looking for Truffaut’s alter ego Jean-Pierre Leaud, who began his career as the runaway boy Antoine in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, to play King Herod in his movie.

The story alternates between dreamlike happenings and musical sequences that involve the ravishing Laetitia Casta, who plays Salome, lip-synching Chinese ballads in a snowy forest or in a sewer beneath the Louvre. There is also a restless film producer (played by Fanny Ardant, Truffaut’s actress and last partner in life) looking in vain for a stag, an animal character in the movie-within-the-movie, which has gone missing in the gardens of Tuileries palace.

The narrative bewilderment is mitigated to a certain extent when the story emerges halfway through the movie. Kang receives news of his mother’s death when Mathieu Amalric, in a brief cameo, performs oral sex on him in the gardens. Kang returns to Taipei, only to fall into a dreamless slumber in his dimly lit claustrophobic apartment, which is haunted by his mother’s ghost.

Eventually, the director awakes and

returns to Paris to finish the movie, only to find that his actors are lost in the Louvre’s labyrinthine basement.

Captivated by the face of the little boy Antoine when he first saw The 400 Blows, Tsai repeatedly said Face originated with his desire to film the aging face of Leaud, who also appears in Tsai’s 2001 What Time Is It Over There? (你那邊幾點). Face is heavy on references to Truffaut, one of the founders of French New Wave cinema. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Lee (Tsai’s stand-in) and Leaud (Truffaut’s stand-in) are seen alone on the set of the Salome film. Speaking in broken English, the two can hardly understand each other, but they play a game in which they take turns recalling the names of past cinematic masters.

Tsai further summons Truffaut’s three muses, Jeanne Moreau, Nathalie Baye and Ardant, for a scene in which the trio assemble at a dining table in apartments once occupied by Napoleon III and hum the theme song from Truffaut’s 1962 Jules and Jim.