Tsai Ming-liang is one of my very favorite filmmakers. His new film Visage (Face) is one of the reasons I’m extra sad not to be at Cannes right now, and one of the big reasons (no matter how the Cannes reviews might lean) I refuse to miss the Toronto festival this year.
I’ve been (im)patiently waiting for a trailer or footage to arrive this week, and Jen Yamato from Rotten Tomatoes just pointed it out via Twitter.
This thing is gorgeous. Right here is the spot where I’m supposed to tell you what the movie is about, but I honestly don’t know. I don’t care. I see the names: Tsai with constant star Lee Kang-sheng, Jeanne Moreau, Laetitia Casta, Fanny Ardant, Mathieu Almaric and more, then I see these images, and I’m sold. The playful mixture of fashion and pop culture, musical numbers and serene, meditative photography that reached a weird plateau in The Wayward Cloud (a funny, difficult and divisive movie) may have been developed further for this take on filmmaking and the Salome myth.
(OK, I relented, there’s a little bit of description.)