Editor, Writer, Researcher
To put it another way: in "Face," Tsai is attempting to convey the collaborative, cumbersome, intimate, creative process. Just as he can only convey to actors what he wants with metaphors and indirection, so these are the only ways he can communicate the process to viewers.
The most repugnant deception is the fairy-tale time and place. The narrator tells us that his parents met "40 years ago." Yet in the late 1950s, the entire country was wracked by a Mao-induced famine that killed up to 30 million people. Emaciated or bloated from dropsy, the villagers would be scrounging for grass, weeds and bark. And this isn't a fertile, rice-growing area. It appears to be low, thinly-forested hills--the sort of area where the half-dead fed on human flesh. If we push the time up to 1960, there still wouldn't be such abundance ...
It’s an unlikely scenario for a filmmaker from Thailand, especially someone from the dusty northeastern city of Khon Kaen. The son of two doctors, he saw little art and no art–house movies when he was growing up. After earning an architecture degree in Khon Kaen, he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was there ...
Susan J Cunningham 