A young woman wakes up in a grimy hotel room with floral wallpaper marked by damp stains. She discovers that the window is frosted over and won’t open while she has no idea of how she got there or who she is but otherwise instinctively knows that the face she sees in the mirror does not belong to her. She tries to call out and hears a voice from an adjacent room telling her to be quiet and that her name is “Anne”. Anne asks her how she knows if she can’t see her, but the voice just tells her that she knows her name is Anne with no further explanation.
As it turns out in Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn’s Faces of Anne (แอน) every girl in the place has the same name and as gradually becomes apparent are all reflections of a single personality. The key Anne discovers that her face seems to change seemingly at random leaving her uncertain even within the bounds of her fractured identity. A psychiatrist tells her that a name is “not as important as who you are” while encouraging her to learn to accept the face she sees as her own, but she remains confused, abstracted from herself, and unable to reconcile her selfhood with its reflection. Meanwhile, she is stalked by a violent demon in the guise of a deer name Vitigo who wanders the hospital corridors taking out any Annes that it finds.
What seems to be going on is an attempt to reintegrate the shards of a fractured personality into a coherent whole only it’s manifesting as a massacre of the self as the demon bumps off each of the multiple Annes insisting that only one, the “real” Anne, can be allowed to leave. But then no one is really only one person but presents a series of personas to the outside world all of whom can be said to be “real” even if otherwise inauthentic. In an illuminating flashback, high school girl Anne chats with another couple of girls about fake online profiles where they can share their “real” selves each of which of course have a completely different profile photo much as the serial Annes have a different face. What we can assume to be the key Anne expresses that she just wants to find a place where she can be completely herself and thinks she has one in a relationship with a boyfriend whose face we never see but had shades both of a man who might be her father and the hero of a video game the atmosphere of which seems to have coloured the aesthestics of her eerie mindscape.
Some might find it easy to dismiss her identity crisis as teenage angst or to suggest that what she’s suffering from is a broken heart though Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn also make reference to a number of problems faced by young people in contemporary Thailand such as online harassment and bullying, sexual harrassment at school and the bad student movement protesting an oppressive educational environment laying bare the pressures on key Anne’s mind that might cause her to become estranged from herself. Asking probing questions about identity, the film wonders if Anne can learn to find herself as distinct from all of these images or if in the end identity and image are inextricably linked to the extent that they can no longer exist distinctly and Anne has no power to identify herself but must rely on the identification of others. Then again, the voice from the other room knows she is Anne without seeing her precisely as she is also Anne, identifying herself in the absence of image.
Eerie and filled with a Lynchian dread in its hellish lightning and grimy hotel room setting, the film turns Anne’s psychodrama into an existential slasher in which she awaits the arrival of the Final Girl. Retracing her steps, she seeks escape in a pattern of trial and error unwittingly at war with herself even as tussles over identity and authenticity while trying to reconstruct a shattered identity by reclaiming the images of the past or perhaps as simply as the psychiatrist had put it learning to accept the face she now wears as her own. Haunting and empathetic, the film has only sympathy for the wandering ghosts of a fractured mind and the vague hope that together they can put Anne together again.
Faces of Anne screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.
Original trailer (English subtitles)
Images: © M Pictures Entertainment Public Company Limited.
Windows on Worlds 