If Face was to be a painting, it will be Tsai Ming-liang’s self-portrait.

And what an expensive work of art it is, costing US$6.15 million and three years to make, including research and location hunting. Face is also the first film to be entered into the Louvre’s permanent art collection.

And since it’s expensive art, you can’t buy it; you can only enjoy the experience.

Tsai, Taiwan’s leading art film director, said his work usually reflects his current mood.

“When I was making The Wayward Cloud, I was very angry and frustrated for many reasons and that showed,” he tells AsiaNews in an interview with the translation help of Zoe Cheng of the Taiwan Economic Cooperation Office in Bangkok. Tsai was in town recently to receive the Lotus Award for cinematic achievement at the 7th World Film Festival.

In Face, he shows a somewhat melancholic, gloomy picture. It tells of a director shooting a film in the Louvre based on the myth of Salome. In the middle of filming, he has to return to Taipei because his mother died.

Tsai dedicates the film to his mother, who coincidentally, died in the midst of filming the movie.

Face stars his frequent collaborator Lee Kang-sheng and European supermodel Laetitia Casta, who plays Salome.

The film showcases Tsai’s signature style of long quiet scenes shot in medium range that allows the audience to observe the characters as they go through a whole gamut of emotions. The dialogue is sparse but not wasted although those who are used to noisy, rambunctious films would get bored.

Tsai, in fact, warned another reporter not to expect too much from the film because she might fall asleep.

“It’s hard to describe the film with a message,” Tsai says of Face. “But you can see how the characters feel... their anxieties and inabilities to control things and circumstances.”

Tsai admits that he experiences the same anxiety over his work “but it has never gone to a state that it’s out of control”.

Face is nominated in this year’s Golden Horse—the so-called Chinese Oscars—but he expressed surprise at his selection. “The Golden Horse represents an index of the film industry but it has never changed its mass-market orientation. However, there is a need to acknowledge that cinema has an artistic component.”

He notes that the current state of film-making has made it more difficult for art directors like him because of the emphasis on commercial success. “There are two choices for film-makers. One is to do what the market wants and another is to be yourself, create your own work and style. I chose the latter.”

It would, thus, be unlikely to expect Tsai to join the bandwagon of directing big-budget epic films that have been coming out mainly from China. And he is candid enough to admit that his works are not for the mass market.

“My films hardly become boxoffice successes...but I’m lucky that I always have films to shoot and the audience understands my films better and better,” he says.

In order to reach a wider audience for his films, Tsai says he has gone to the streets to sell tickets to his screenings, as well as give lectures that would familiarise students with his works. He is set to give a series of lectures in the United States later this year.

He says it is difficult to fight against the “Hollywood-style” of film-making but he persists. “I am becoming old. I have to do what I want to do. The (mass) market is very elusive to me but it does not need my presence. My concern is more on how I can have more freedom to create films.”

The director considers Face as a turning point for him, when perhaps he has learned to accept the public’s tag of being an ‘artist’ and not just ‘film director’.

“From the beginning, I was called an art film director but it didn’t help for the audience to understand why there is art in films. Many people consider films as entertainment more than art,” he says.

Face, he says, has allowed him to explore the prospect of pursuing his art for an audience that is sure to appreciate it: in museums and collections for instance, and where his films would enjoy a longer shelf-life.

He, however, is pessimistic about the future of the film industry especially in Asia. “There is a lot of creativity in film-making in Asia but the orientation is very Western. We have to develop our own film industry and we can’t lose our own characteristics.”

If there’s anything that’s apparent in Face, it’s that Tsai has come to terms with his place in the world of art cinema, and has beautifully melded his French new wave influences with Oriental culture. And there couldn’t have been a more perfect setting than the Louvre.

But then again, that may just be one way of looking at it. After all, like art, Tsai’s films can mean anything.

“A film is open to interpretation. It is an experience,” he concludes. (By Yasmin Lee Arpon in Bangkok/ Asia News Network/ Asia News Network)