For Tsai’s and Truffaut’s fans, it feels almost like a dream to see Ardant (as the film producer and herself), who comes out of the French director’s films and into Tsai’s movie, stays in Kang’s old apartment and shares fruit with the spirit of the director’s dead mother (played by Lu Yi-ching, 陸奕靜, the stand-in for Tsai’s mother in his other movies) while browsing through books about her deceased lover. For Tsai, perhaps, evoking memories and faces that have long faded with time is a way of coping with the loss of his mother.
Face is replete with Tsai’s signatures and full of references to his own films. These include performances from Lee, Lu and Chen Shiang Chyi (陳湘琪); and auteurist repetition of motifs including homosexuality, aquariums (a reference to What Time Is It Over There?), flooding (The Hole, 洞), and odd musical numbers (Wayward Cloud, 天邊一朵雲). Openly quoting himself in an abstruse mode, Tsai’s Face has been criticized as bloated and overly self-indulgent. But for Tsai enthusiasts, the film may seem more like a cinematic puzzle that, when pieced together, provides insight into the director’s elusive art.
One example is the recurrent imagery of water in Tsai’s works. The director’s obsession with water assumes many forms in Face. In an early scene, Kang tries to fix a leaky kitchen faucet and winds up flooding the entire apartment, which is suggestive of his inability to exert control over life. The image of water becomes darker and more sinister toward the end as Kang is seen slowly approaching a subterranean pond at the Louvre, not knowing where he is, while holding incense as if he were going to pay tribute to his dead mother.
In the last scene, Tsai himself appears, though barely recognizable in the long take, asking Kang to entice the stag to return, which it does. A big glassy pond dominates the frame, as if it were a mirror — one of many mirrors in the film — that reflects everything but can hold nothing.
Ultimately, Face is a cinematic dream where the boundaries between life and cinema are blurred and the two mutually inform and permeate into each other. When Leaud finally crawls his way out of the underground labyrinth of the Louvre through what looks like a giant mouse hole in a wall, he emerges in a gallery framed by three paintings, one of which is Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of St John the Baptist. He is still in the Louvre, in the dream that is dreamt by Tsai.
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