Face - Visage 2009

Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salome myth.Visage requires something like a Tsai primer, or maybe is one: the film develops in Tsai shorthand, the symbols, motifs, and even scenes of his previous films given about a shot apiece. (Adrian) Martin calls Tsai’s closed, scrubbed spaces, where characters enact rituals over and over like hamsters on a wheel, “communicating vessels,” but for the first time in Tsai, the spaces don’t communicate; and Visage is nearly the sum of its symbols. Where previous Tsais are based on exploring buildings that operate like organisms—a flooded apartment complex, a movie house, and so many houses and rooms—each room and each shot in Visage is nearly self-contained from the rest, and each the real-time staging of a single idea as installation piece (with the key exception of a haunted house in an indeterminate location where sound carries from one shot to another and whose architecture is laid out in pieces throughout the whole film)