Face

Director: Tsai Ming-Liang
Year Released: 2009
Rating: 1.0

Tsai's stand-in, Lee Kang-Sheng, is in the Louvre making a movie (loosely) based on Salome. I'm not sure what happened to Tsai between I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and this, but apparently he lost all complete interest in making a movie with characters with multiple dimensions, dialogue that makes sense (the conversation between director Lee and Jean-Pierre Léaud is nonsense) and scenes that have some kind of purpose or 'fit' in the grand scheme of the 'story' (a sexual encounter between Mathieu Amalric and Lee just comes - no pun intended - out of nowhere). What is there has little connection and appears to have been assembled at random: a visually stunning but emotionally (and textually) vacant assemblage of scenes either from Salome or from Tsai's past films (the fish, the rice cooker, flooding) or in direct reference to Truffaut's past films. At least the title makes sense: there are a whole lotta faces in there.