Fanciful visions

The director Tsai Ming-Liang, centre, arrives at the Cannes showing of Visage with the cast members Fanny Ardant and Jean-Pierre Leaud. "His face has influenced my films a lot," Tsai said of Leaud.

The Malaysian director Tsai Ming-Liang's latest movie, Visage, is among several recent films out of South East Asia that blur the line between installation art and cinema. Liza Foreman reports At Cannes this year, one project stood out from the usual crop of -auteur films, which often depict decidedly grey pictures of modern-day life. Visage, a wonderfully colourful and campy adaptation of the -opera Salome, contains striking images and beautifully creative scenes to match the most flamboyant of fashion campaigns: fluffy white fur hats, a mirror-lined forest filled with moose, and the stunning faces of French actresses and models, -including Fanny Ardant and -Laetitia Casta. The director, Tsai Ming-Liang, is one of Asia's most experimental and aesthetically minded filmmakers. The movie is set at the Louvre, which not only commissioned the film but also allowed rare access to the museum during shooting. I thought the film was a delightful -visual feast but Tsai didn't sound half as convinced. "It was boring, right?" he asked sheepishly after the screening. On the contrary. Visage is a rare treat in a world where the realities of the film business make it ever harder for well-crafted and unusual experimental pictures like this one to be seen, let alone flourish. "I think of the film as a moving painting imprinted on celluloid," said the director, who spent three years studying the paintings at the Louvre. "It is Tsai trying to find a new expression for the art in his head." He's not alone. Several unusual films from South East Asia dominate the selection of the aptly named Visions section of the -Toronto International Film Festival this week. The line-up includes -Visage, the Filipino director Raya Martin's Independencia, the Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Nymph, and Malaysia's Chris Chong Chan Fui's Karaoke, which begins with a blank screen and subtitles. These directors often find inspiration in odd places. Chong creates stories around buildings and other inanimate objects. Tsai's inspiration for Visage, meanwhile, was a real-life face. "The very first idea that got me thinking about this was Jean-Pierre Leaud," he said, referring to the muse and star of François Truffaut's films. "His face has influenced my films a lot. It changed my life. His face -frozen on the screen reminded me that film isn't just -escapism. It is also dialogue." Visage is a film within a film that tells the story of a Taiwanese director who goes to the Louvre to make a film based on the myth of Salome. Even though Tsai speaks neither French nor English, he gave the main part of King Herod to Leaud to help guarantee box-office success and the role of Salome to Casta. On one level, the film reflects how Tsai experiences the West. "Every time I leave Chinese territory, I feel like I am mute," he said. "I have to rely on -visuals and still be able to find my way around. I rely on my sense of smell." Henri Loyrette, the president and director of the Louvre -Museum, said: "What Tsai Ming-Lang shows - people wandering in the great -gallery or dining in the Salon -Napoleon III - is not at all strange or -foreign to the vocation of the palace. There is in this palace a theatrical potential. He creates fictions that could have occurred here, inspired by the very nature of our collections, with their great themes." The Louvre is a natural partner for such filmmakers. Both Tsai and Chong work as installation artists and say the line between the two worlds is blurring. Like the Swiss installation artist Pipilotti Rist, whose feature debut Pepperminta -premiered at Venice earlier this month, Chong's debut feature, -Karaoke, recently premiered at the Director's Fortnight in Cannes. The follow-up to his award-winning shorts will screen for the public for the first time in Toronto. "What is new is the idea that filmmakers like myself, Rist and Tsai are crossing over between fine arts and cinema," said Chong. "I find it interesting that we are asking how installation or film lend themselves to theatre, cinema or books." With its theme of homecoming - a subject familiar to Malaysian audiences - Karaoke sounds more conventional than Visage. But the execution of the film is unconventional. Chong begins with a black screen and subtitles much like those in karaoke, and takes eight minutes to get to what he calls a full feature with dialogue, action and lights. Throughout the film, he plays with conventional structures. "Hollywood always wants a -beginning, middle and end," he said, explaining a scene in -Karaoke in which there are really three scenes going on at once. (There are also three parts to the film, one in a karaoke bar, one at a plantation and one at a beach.) "I didn't want to take a feature film for granted - for example, cinematographers would normally say: 'You do this.' Whether good or bad, I asked: 'Why do we have to do this? Why do we need this?' At the same time, I respect the medium and -traditions. You don't want to insult the audience. You want them to keep watching." Karaoke tells the story of a young man who returns home to his village from the capital to find that things have changed. At night, he works shooting karaoke videos in his -parents' bar. Chong lived for many years in Canada before returning to Malaysia, where he now lives, but he says the film is not autobiographical. It speaks to a wider migration to and from Malaysia. "I really don't know what the definition of home is anymore," he said. I always think of it as a comfort zone but I think that is a fantasy. We fake ourselves. We want beautiful -villages and a nice family. That's why I used karaoke to portray that reality. There are people singing songs of love and loss that they have never felt, and scenes of a place they have never been." In some ways, Chong learns to make a feature film on camera -during Karaoke. "This is my retaliation for not being able to go to a film school or art school," he said. (He began experimenting with filmmaking in Canada after he received a degree in business studies, and before he returned home to work in a hotel.) "Every project is an exploration of something that I always wanted to learn about making films," he said. In one of his short films, Chong looks at the interface of light and sound. "Three films later, I wanted to play with dialogue. One at a time, I am getting to how you make a -feature film. My approach to filmmaking was never about stories and telling a happy or sad story. I look at it from a clinical and systematic point of view." His films "always start from a structure or an inanimate object that triggers me to say there is something more here, there are stories here", he said. "These structures create a framework for my stories." (His award-winning short Block B is essentially a 20-minute still shot of a building. A second short, Kolam, is about a water filtration tank, but also includes a sentimental story.) "-Karaoke started with the environment, the trees and the karaoke screen and the subtitles." Chong's upcoming projects include an installation commissioned by the city of Yokohama and based on a scene from the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's film High and Low. The late director had to shoot in a studio rather than on the streets of Yokohama; Chong will film on location. His new film project, Tour, will be set in his hometown in -Borneo. And he has also been commissioned to do an installation for a major American art gallery. He doesn't let these successes go to his head. "You can't expect anything from it," he said. "You can't think that way or you would never be happy. In a way, that is the illusion of reality that we were talking about. I know enough of the reality of cinema as an art form and media as an art form. I see the other side and I don't want to go back there, which is part of the film. For me it is good to keep a distance from what I do. I want to be happy and stay around for a bit longer and concentrate on my family and friends and the people I love. That is my longevity. The film stuff becomes markers in my life."