In Tsai’s latest film, Lee Kang-sheng graduates from the director’s muse to his alter ego, playing a filmmaker shooting a version of an ambitious restaging of Salome in Paris. Tsai’s second film shot in France, and the first feature given official license to shoot within the Louvre, Face features such legendary stars of the French cinema as Jean-Pierre Léaud, Fanny Ardant and Jeanne Moreau, as well as canvases by Leonardo and ravishing costumes by Christian Lacroix. Partly funded by the Louvre, Face may be the summit of Tsai’s mode of narration-by-subtraction, with the film’s structure distilled to a series of gorgeously choreographed and elliptical episodes set within the inner chambers of the Louvre and, most spectacularly, within the winter dreamscape of a mirrored Tuileries. As the director wanders in search of his phantom project, the  web of relationships among the film’s cast and crew are gradually revealed while many of Tsai’s preoccupations reappear: the haunting presence of lost parents and missing lovers, unexpected and eccentric musical numbers and unexpected sexual and romantic roundezvous.