23/05/2009

With his tribute to cinema and in particular French film, Visage [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang today with Spanish director Isabel Coixet closed the Competition of the 62nd Cannes Film Festival .

The tenth feature film by the top director of the second wave of Taiwanese cinema second 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 Cinéma.

This project began precisely with the Louvre and the Asian maestro happy accepted their proposal to take on such a location. Tsai Ming-Liang’s idea was to create an epic encounter between Jean-Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut’s favourite actor, and Lee Kang-sheng, the protagonist of all of Ming-Liang’s films.

Both had worked in What Time Is It There? without ever meeting, however, and the director developed a story in which a Taiwanese filmmaker shoots a film on the myth of Salomè at the Louvre. The part of King Herod goes to Léaud, while a famous model (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 (Fanny Ardant) tries hard to fix the situation.

Spectacular and magnetic, Visage features all the passions and obsessions of its filmmaker. The Louvre is perhaps the true protagonist of the film but the artistic creation that is cinema is behind each and every one of Ming-Liang’s perennially static frames: from Casta’s dance among the mirrors of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai to the explicit references that Léaud and Kang-Sheng make to Pasolini, Fellini, Antonioni, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin.

Casta is forced to stay in an industrial refrigerator among hanging pieces of beef, dance in snowy forests, run through hallways in long dresses and wrap up her beloved in cellophane. Ardant sits at a lavishly set table with Jeanne Moreau and Nathalie Baye. The actor’s body is adapted to a large painting that, admits the director, "makes no sense in his drama, like we’re used to seeing. I simply showed a world of dreams mixed with reality".

(Translated from Italian)