Het masker

THE MASK, made nineteen years later, is just as metallic-cold a film as BEAUTY. This film, too, is set in the zone between real and unreal, the position of the images being wholly obscure at times: when homeless Philippe's hair is being done and he is being clothed like a bourgeois, are we still in a documentary? (the changes are inflicted on his body, that is true). The costume is the mask that Philippe, wandering the streets of Paris, dreams of while the city is getting ready for the mega-show, the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of Human Rights. Johan van der Keuken