*Note: One ticket grants admission to both films + the after party
Your Face (Tsai Ming-liang, 2018, 76 min.) –– 5:00pm
Radically rethinking the tired talking-heads template, Tsai Ming-liang’s latest digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue. Comprised of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals (Tsai devotees will no doubt recognize his long-time muse, Lee Kang-sheng), the film shrewdly deemphasizes language while reducing context to a bare minimum. In their place, the beauty and imperfections of each face take center stage. Accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack of dynamically modulating drone frequencies, Tsai’s subjects variously speak, stare, and, at one point, sleep as the camera quietly registers the weight of personal history and accumulated experience writ beautifully across every last pore and crevasse.
Visage (Tsai Ming-liang, 2009, 141 min.) –– 7:00pm
A filmmaker is attempting to complete an ambitious project in the midst of a family tragedy in this self-referential drama from writer and director Tsai Ming-Liang. Hsaio-Kong (Lee Kang-Sheng) is a director from Taiwan who is soon to begin shooting his next picture, a stylized adaptation of Salome, in France, though first he has to help his elderly mother (Lu Yi-Ching) with some plumbing problems. Hsaio-Kong arrives in Paris to discover his producers have cast a well-known model with no acting experience (Laetitia Casta) in the leading role, which adds to the challenge of working in a language in which he's not fluent and having a leading man (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who seems to have lost his memory. Hsaio-Kong's troubles with the shoot are at once exacerbated and made insignificant when he learns of the death of his mother. Featuring guest appearances from Fanny Ardant, Nathalie Baye and Jeanne Moreau.
[Your Face] exerts a soothing, almost mesmeric pull.
- Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
Filled with gorgeous and inexplicable events... [Visage is] undoubtedly the prettiest movie in Cannes' main competition.
- Eric Kohn, Indiewire
Unfailingly pleasing as cinema... [Your Face] holds enough contained dynamism to make each handsomely composed static shot interesting on one or more levels.
- Jay Weissberg, Variety
Summarizing Tsai’s obsessions while sharpening his style, Visage is ultimately the ideal Louvre film: an entrancing and unnerving tour of one gallery after another, each image a work for viewers to lose themselves in.
- Fernando F. Croce, Reverse Shot
[Your Face] serves as a semi-extension on Andy Warhol’s famous “Screen Tests" and Gregory Markopoulos’ Galaxie... Almost half a century later, Tsai replaces the glamor evoked by the icons of Warhol and Markopoulos’ vital works with a rumination on old age and the passage of time.
- Jason Ooi, The Film Stage
(Available to download after screening date)