Louvre film-making foray flops in Cannes

CANNES, France (AFP) — The Louvre's first foray into film production, "Visage" shot by Taiwan director Tsai Ming-Liang, flopped at a Cannes screening on Saturday with half the audience walking out.

The first of a new set of works produced by the Paris museum, imagined as a tribute to French New Wave cinema, "Visage" (Face) is about a Taiwanese director shooting a film at the Paris museum based on the myth of Salome.

"I make my films rather like a painter," Tsai told reporters after a preview of the movie, the 19th of 20 films running for the festival's Palme d'Or, with a star-studded French cast including the model Laetitia Casta.

"Image is always something absolutely central to me as a director," said the Malaysian-born Taiwan director, who used the Louvre's Renaissance collections as a starting point for the film, which gets a gala screening later Saturday.

But despite rich visuals and some quirky song-and-dance routines, the mostly static series of tableaux failed to impress, with much of the press audience leaving before the end and a smattering of applause from those that stayed.

"Although it occasionally sports a pretty 'Face', Tsai Ming-Liang's laborious Francophone feature winds up seriously irritating the skin without ever actually getting under it," Variety wrote.

"Only diehard fans will hark to this strictly arthouse item, which reps a shaky cinematic debut for Gaul's foremost house of art."

Much of the French press was scathing, with the exception of the left-wing Liberation which found the film and its lead actress Casta visually "dazzling".

The Louvre supported the writing and production of Tsai's "Visage," which kicks off a fiction film initiative, following similar ventures with writers and musicians, from American Toni Morrison to France's Pierre Boulez.

"In all of his works there is a real reflexion on images, on painting, on memory, themes that are closely related to the Louvre," the museum's director Henri Loyrette told AFP.

"The aim was not to make money. We would have chosen something different if it was a commercial project."

The director of "The Wayward Cloud" said the Louvre's collections were a great source of inspiration for his 10th film, but admitted the invitation to make a film for the museum was "like an enormous weight, an enormous stone."