So before I begin, I should say two things about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: 1) I have a lot of respect for writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, though I didn't love the only other film of his that I saw, Syndromes and a Century. It was absolutely beautiful to watch, but was basically impossible to understand. Weerasethakul is a darling of the critic and festival worlds, possibly because he's so impenetrable it makes people feel smart to say they love him, even if they don't understand him; 2) I only understand about 60-75% of this film, but parts of it have really stuck with me and I think I really like it.
So what I can glean about the film is that Uncle Boonmee is an old Thai man who is very close to dying. He's living in a remote area in the jungle with his sister-in-law, who has become his life companion, and being taken care of by a male nurse who gives him kidney dialysis. It seems that in Thai culture is is common that just before the time of your death you are visited by spirits of loved ones and characters from your past lives.
At dinner one night, Boonmee's deceased wife, gone for about 30 or 40 years, comes back and sits at the table with them. She's very warm and happy to know her sister and husband have made a life together. She thanks them for the things they gave to her at the Buddhist temple. After a few minutes of conversation, a giant monkey with red light eyes comes into the dining area and sits down. It turns out he is Boonmee's son who disappeared a few years after his mother died. It seems the son met a monkey spirit at some point and mated with it and then became a monkey spirit as well. (Well, he now just looks like a guy in a gorilla costume with red laser eyes.)
From there we start to see some of Boonmee's past lives. We see a sequence where there is a princess being carried through the jungle on a sedan chair. She has some sort of sexual relationship with one of the servants. They go into a cave where there is a small pond inside. She begins to talk to a catfish who lives in the pond and he convinces to her get into the water. From there he begins to give her cunnilingus and thrash about a lot.
Each scene has a dreamy quality with beautiful photography throughout, but they never really have true beginnings and endings (this is very much Weerasethakul's style from what I can tell). What makes matters more interesting, and more uncomfortable, is the many scenes are shot from outside of a point of comfort, outside of a point of intimacy. They are not really long shots where we're looking at people from 50 feet away, but are normally about 15 feet from the action, making everything seem a bit more distant, both emotionally and geographically. Add to this that the dialogue seems to be delivered in a very stilted manner, not as normal flowing conversation, but where people say their lines, then pause for a beat or two and then the other will respond.
This has a very strange effect on what we see. It certainly keeps up outside of the action. Unlike in some scenes around a dinner table, for instance, where you feel like you're sitting with the characters, here you really feel like you're watching the scene from an adjoining space. It also gives an internal structure and rigidity to a film that has very little of both throughout. Each scene rather melts into the next, but within each scene, there is a very defined architecture.
On a more emotional level, though, it definitely pushes us farther away from the action. We don't feel, say, like we are part of Boonmee's family who is taking care of him before his death. We feel like we're observing this happening from somewhere else. I think this has an interesting effect, considering the film is about death and reincarnation - two things we mortals know very little about - and if we were any closer we would have to understand more about those states. We are kept outside of the emotional center of the film because we are not ready to understand the depth of Boonmee's journey.
After seeing the film I am left with many more questions than answers about it. Was Boonmee the princess, the servant or the catfish in the story we saw? Are other animals we see throughout the film also some of his past lives? When we see a montage of still shots of the monkey-spirit man hanging out with men in camo military uniforms and machine guns, is that a pun on the words "gorilla" and "guerrilla"? Is that sequence about the deep spiritual side of men who sometimes kill others? Or that the monkey spirit is a violent one? Is the last act just a long way of saying that "after people die, those who survive move on with their lives"? (I really don't understand the gist of the last act.) Are we all able to separate our spirits from our bodies in everyday life so our bodies can watch TV and our spirits can go out for karaoke?
It's easy to say that some of these questions are more interesting than most films one normally sees.Though it's frustrating that this is such an opaque work, I appreciate that Weerasethakul clearly has a different view of the world than most people (which was also clearly shown in Syndromes and a Century). I'm happy that this film is much more linear a plot than Syndromes was (though, of course, it's not a very linear plot).
At times this film reminded me a lot of Haruki Murakami's Khafka on the Shore and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There is something very similar in the way Murakami moves his stories from our physical world to an unseen meta/spiritual one. People exist in this world and can move into the spirit world (or the spirit world can move into ours) in a very normal way. The lyrical idea that there are layers to our world and we only see one of those layers with our eyes is very interesting and a very central to the concepts here.
Stars: 3 of 4
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