THE FACE YOU DESERVE **

Before "Tabu" and the "Arabian Nights" trilogy catapulted him into the international limelight Miguel Gomes gave us "The Face You Deserve", his debut feature, which now seems in its quiet, phantasmagorical way something of a dry-run for the classics that followed. It's two strangely surreal episodes tenuously use the fairy-tales "The Sleeping Beauty" and "The Ugly Duckling" as jumping off points though making sense of what follows may not be so easy. In many ways its like "The Arabian Nights" in miniature or something that, once upon a time, Luis Bunuel might have made. It certainly marked Gomes as a director to watch although the film itself didn't make much of an impact outside its native Portugal, (it has never received a British cinema release), and it won't appeal to a mass audience. Cineastes, however, looking for a challenge, and fans of Gomes' later work should lap it up.