LFF 2010: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Craig from Dark Eye Socket here with the first of several reports from the 54th BFI London Film Festival. Dave started things off the other day with thoughts on festival opener Never Let Me Go and a grab bag of London delights, but first up for me is a trip to Thailand with this year's celebrated Palme d'Or winner.

Ah, Uncle Boonmee. You’ll now be able to add the LFF to your lifetime of recollections. File it alongside your many prestigious appearances at other key festivals this past year – the crowning achievement of a Palme d’Or ushering you toward us here in London. Apichatpong ('Joe') Weerasethakul’s latest hothouse bedazzlement, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is one of the LFF’s flagship titles. Keen festival followers may already be familiar with its plot, but a truncated version goes something like this: in the Thai countryside Uncle Boonmee is suffering from kidney failure; his final days are spent with family – both dead and alive, human and non-human – before he treks to a cave for his last moments.

Typical plot structure is prone to derailment by uncommon and unearthly visuals at any point; strange episodes (remembered moments from his past lives?) pepper the film. [spoilers] One sequence where a scarred princess has awkward, vigorous sex with a talking catfish is both absurdly compelling and stunningly filmed, and certainly something you won’t see anywhere else this, or any, year. Spectral visitations are a regular occurrence round gentle ol’ Boonmee’s house – making him a kind of lovely, reverse Scrooge – and are initially chilling, then rather becalming, especially the huge hair-covered beast with glowering red eyes who looms on a staircase before... sitting down for dinner. Boonmee’s long-deceased wife drops by, too; she materialises several times to the almost comical astonishment of the flesh Boonmee clan. [/spoilers] These characters baffle, but are indispensably alluring. When the film goes off on its wondrously weird whims it becomes pleasingly enigmatic.

Weerasethakul’s films often get posited as litmus tests of the true filmgoer’s arthouse mettle. (Just below ticking off titles on a Béla Tarr checklist.) There’s always guaranteed something soothingly elegiac to be taken from his work; something not always readily graspable, but inarguably extraordinary and sometimes belatedly fulfilling. But with Boonmee there’s a hint of strained repetition in the way he structures and presents – albeit still subtly, and with delicate, personable care – his sparse story. Familiar conceptual totems are present; wondrous shot compositions are correct. But is Weerasethakul in danger of prematurely recycling his already well-used ideas? Both his last two features Tropical Malady and Syndromes of a Century were delightfully invigorating – even during their moments of stasis – but at times Boonmee often feels more like an extension of the same old, same old. I could recall his past films far too easily. (And, for me, the two film "recollections" from his recent ‘Primitive’ installation, Phantom of Nabua and this film’s precursor/side project, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, served his core concerns well enough.) Still, more hulking, red-eyed jungle beasts wouldn’t go amiss next time. C+

Uncle Boonmee will be reincarnated at the LFF on Sunday 17th and Monday 18th October
related articles: Nathaniel's review from NYFF and Oscar's Best Foreign Film Competitive List.

NYFF: "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"

*slight spoilers ahead but this is not a "plot" film.*

Uncle Boonmee can recall his past lives. My memory is hardly as uncanny. Recalling or describing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the Cannes Palme D'Or winner and Thailand's Oscar submission, even a few days after the screening is mysteriously challenging. Even your notes won't help you.

This is not to say that the movie isn't memorable, rather that its most memorable images and stories refuse direct interpretation or cloud the edges of your vision, making it as hazy as the lovely cinematography. You can recall the skeletal story these images drift towards like moths and you can try to get to know the opaque characters that see them with you but these efforts have a low return on investment. What's important is the seeing.

What's wrong with my eyes? They are open but I can't see a thing.

Most synopses of the movie will only embellish on the film's title. And while Uncle Boonmee does reflect on past lives, he only does so directly in the pre-title sequence as we follow him in ox form through an attempted escape from his farmer master, who will eventually rope him back in. The bulk of the film is not a recollection -- at least not from Boonmee himself, but a slow march towards his death while he meditates on life and the film meditates on animal and human relations. His nephew and sister in law, who objects to his immigrant nurse, visit him. So too does his dead wife and another ghostly visitor on the same night, in a bravura early sequence that as incongruously relaxed as it is eery and startling.

The film peaks well before its wrap with the story of a scarred princess and a lustful talking catfish and then we begin the march towards Boonmee's death, perhaps the most literal moment in the movie. And then curiously, the movie continues on once he's gone. If it loses much of its potency after Boonmee has departed, there are still a few fascinating images to scratch your head over when he's gone.

The bifurcated structure that Weerathesakul has employed in the past is less prevalent this time.  Uncle Boonmee plays out not so much like two mysteriously reflective halves (see the haunting Tropical Malady which I find less accessible but actually stronger), but rather like a series of short films that all belong to the same continuous chronological movie, give or take that gifted horny catfish.

Surely a google search, press notes, academic analysis or listening to the celebrated director Apichatpong "Joe" Weerathesakul speak (as I did after the screening) would and can provide direct meaning to indirect cinema. But what's important is the seeing.

Vision is frequently mentioned and referenced in Uncle Boonmee, whether it's mechanical -- as in a preoccupation with photography which peaks in a late film sequence composed of still images -- or organic. But like the ghost monkey with glowing red eyes (the film's signature image) says to Uncle Boonmee early in the film, "I can't see well in the bright light." It's the one exchange in the film that I wholly related to and understood. I'm not sure I need or want to understand, to attach specific meaning to these confounding stories and images. I only want to see them. Weerasethakul's movie is best experienced in the dark, with the images as spiritual guides. They fall around you like mosquito netting as you walk slowly through the Thai jungle. B+/B

We all go a little link sometimes

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Modern Maestros: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Robert here, back with another entry in my series on great contemporary directors.

Maestro: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Known For: Difficult, often dreamlike films about the changing times.
Influences: Edward Yang, Maya Deren, Abbas Kiarostami, according to the man himself.
Masterpieces: Syndromes and a Century
Disasters: none
Better than you remember: I'm not sure how this could possibly apply to AW
Box Office: Almost $47 thousand in the U.S. for Tropical Malady

I come into this as a great admirer of, though by no means an expert on Apichatpong Weerasethakul. When I started this series almost a year ago I knew I'd get to Weerasethakul (who goes by the nickname "Joe" henceforth) eventually. Back then awareness of him in the cinephile community felt spotty at best. Now as the most recent winner of the Palme d'Or he's poised to take the next step toward notability (though I wouldn't expect his films to take any further steps toward accessibility). Still, I encourage anyone well versed in the man's films to please join in the conversation. What I'm trying to say is if anyone knows how to pronounce his name, that information would be super. Like all of the Asian directors we've discussed here, Joe is primarily interested in the intersection of the past and present. How love manifests itself in this space is his primary concern, almost all of his films touch on it even if a bit. Not that Joe has limited himself to just one topic. The changing landscape of Asian culture, technology, society and spirituality have all found their way into his films.

Structurally, most of Joe's films are split into two distinct sections. As the viewer, we're meant to focus not as much on the narrative within each half, but their comparative properties. Consider Syndromes and a Century, where a series of seemingly unrelated dreamlike happenings inhabit two hospitals in two different time frames. The manifestation of human nature, mystery, longing seems to remain a constant through the years, but as time progresses, the presence of monks dissipates, the threat of eerily personified technology grows and the love story tilts ever slightly toward lust. What definitive statements these all add up to are for us to decide. Similarly, the double story in Tropical Malady (the first of which follows a gay romance, the second of which a man lost in the woods, who seems to manifest himself as a spirit). And so we're meant to ponder, what do these stories mean not separately but as a whole, thrust together in one film. Perhaps Joe is juxtaposing the animalistic qualities of love with those of spirituality. Does the modern world that's shunned spirituality still maintain its essence through an embrace of love?

If I feel more concrete on Syndromes and a Century than other Weerasethakul films it's only because I've seen that one three or four times. The others once, not nearly enough to unravel. But Joe's films have this amazing quality that invites the viewer to keep coming back to his films, impenitrable that they may be. If you've not experienced them, I invite you to drop your ideas of what constraints the medium may have and be lost in his world. After all, in the end, the purpose of a film isn't to be a brain teaser (well some perhaps), it's meant to invite us into a new reality for a time. Whether we understand or decipher (or even want to) all the elements of that reality is up to us. I don't expect Apichatpong Weerasethakul to become a popular director even after winning the Palme with his latest, Unclee Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, but his mark on the modern movie landscape is both indescribable and inescapable.

Cannes Review: Fair Game, Uncle Boonmee and more.

Robert here, scouring the internet to give you the latest on the films premiering in Cannes. 

In Competition

• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (no I don't know how it's pronounced) directs this film about a dying man who's visited by the ghosts of his wife and son, in non-human form.  Could we have a late competitor for the Palme?  The AV Club calls it the directors's "strangest and most mysterious picture yet," and means so in a good way.  "It is a mysterious, haunting, and breathtakingly beautiful film," comes from The House Next Door. A film that's good though otherworldy and bizarre may appeal to Burton and his jury.  But it's not all praise.  Guy Lodge at In Contention says the film is "a wispy lark with no emotional payoff."
• Fair Game Director Doug Liman (Jumper, yeah really) directs this film about that whole Valerie Plame affair a few years back.  Reviews are so so.  Xan Brooks of The Guardian is unsold on it.  IndieWIRE considers its "unsentimental tone that only occasionally moves beyond the level of a solid made-for-TV routine."  And The AV Club laments that once the film gets into politics "fast-paced Beltway machinations are replaced by lofty speeches in which we’re exhorted to “demand that truth!”
• Our Life Dante Luchetti, best known for directing the film My Brother is an Only Child, returns with this film about a normal Roman whose life is turned upside down.  Lee Marshall of Screen Daily notes "Our Life has its heart in the right place. But it feels like an episode of a tough, cutting-edge TV drama."  And over at The House Next Door, the complaint seems to be "It's incredibly bizarre, and from a dramatic standpoint makes absolutely no sense."