Tsai Ming-Liang's 'FACE' is kind of mesmerizing

November 13, 5:54 AMSoutheast Asia Travel ExaminerSusan Cunningham

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Best Movies from the World Film Festival of Bangkok

Perhaps  I've undergone a conversion experience. "Face" is long--140 minutes--but this may be Tsai Ming-Liang’s most beautiful, accessible movie to date. Granted, I’d only seen two before this one: “What Time Is It  There?” and the one with the watermelon. Perhaps once you have seen a few Tsai movies, his signature motifs reverberate: holes, tunnels, stairways and long, bare, lonely corridors, Vicious plumbing. Two characters wordlessly trying to communicate. Very long shots of a human walking (usually laboring) toward the camera, from a great distance, along a dingy tiled corridor,

The opening scene is vintage Tsai: Lee Kang-sheng turns on a kitchen faucet and the water blows out like a geyser. He struggles to quell it with a bucket. Meanwhile, water from the pipe under the sink explodes. In the next scene, he slogs knee deep down a flooded hallway to a room where a pregnant woman lies in bed. Presumably this is the character’s wife; Lee, playing a director, is off to France to make a film, leaving plenty of loose ends and burst pipes on the home front.

Before the film began, Tsai and Lee, his longtime leading man, were introduced. Tsai made a few remarks in Chinese that smoothed the way for me: “It’s a film on film. In film there’s always a director. It takes place in France.”  That probably sounds anodyne since Tsai's movies constantly remind you of the cliche about film being a director's medium; the actors could be just about anybody. They don't have to be particularly good actors. So, to put it another way: in "Face,"  he’s trying to convey the collaborative, cumbersome, intimate, creative process. Just as he can only convey to actors what he wants with metaphors and indirection, that’s the only way he can communicate the process to viewers. Not quite sure how the musical interludes fit in.

Excercises in frustration

Aspiring filmmakers must study Tsai’s individual scenes very closely. For example, consider another item in the niggling frustration gallery: a character is hacking away at what must be an over-frosted refrigerator freezer. As with the water faucet, we never see up close the extent of the problem. We just feel the character’s frustration and this way of framing exaggerates the effect.

There are also many beautiful delicious images. While I don’t know about the snow, the picture above is from a scene set in a real forest adorned with strategically placed mirrors.  Imagine it with just a few people and no goofy costumes.

Most of the movie seems set in France—specifically, on sets in France—but Taipei is the setting for another absorbing, still shot. The camera must be perched high up on the exterior ledge of a hotel. The color is monochromic, early morning city light. The lower, left quadrant  of the frame is filled by the intersecting glass walls of a hotel room. Inside, unseen, one of the director’s French assistants is talking on the phone. In the remainder of the frame, highways and looping ramps form a symmetrical pattern as the sound of vehicles whiz in the background.

Chinese spirits

The director character is back in Taipei for his mother’s funeral. Not that this is explained. There’s very, very little dialogue in the film (I can’t recall if it’s subtitled in Thai, but there are English sub-titles for all non-English speaking festival films).  However, there’s a kitchen scene with fruit and other offerings on a table beneath a woman's photograph. The fish tank alone would tell you this is a Chinese home. Then the old woman walks down the gloomy stairway out of the apartment; her spirit is leaving. The very next scene shows the Lee, with water up to his chest, wading through a dark tunnel, lighted incense sticks in hand. It turns out, I think, that he’s back in France making his movie but the transition is made by joining a similar mood.

Those who left early—within the first 100 minutes or so—won’t know why descriptions of "Face" refer to the Louvre and the Biblical Salomé legend. Around this point, it’s revealed that Jean-Pierre Léaud, looking very old and seedy, is playing Herod. Shortly after that, in very Tsai fashion, the actor crawls from a baseboard outlet beneath a famous painting of Salomé  in a Louvre gallery.

I don’t feel to bad about sneaking out to catch one of the last trains before midnight. I wasn’t the first escapee by a long shot. Tsai himself had warned that the movie was 140 minutes long and added that he didn’t think that he or Lee would be available for questions at the end. I don’t think we were going to see John the Baptist’s head on a platter. or a triumphant completion of the film within the film. Can’t think who would even play John the Baptist.