Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.
-- inscription at the head of "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"
I am head-over-heels in love with "Uncle Boonmee."
Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" is the kind of movie that big screens (theatrical and HD) and Blu-ray were made for. I can't think of cinematic worlds more "immersive" (in current 3D parlance) than Apichatpong's last three features, "Tropical Malady" (2004), "Syndromes and a Century" (2006) and "Uncle Boonmee" (2010) -- all of which I have only recently encountered. (They're all on DVD, and "Uncle Boonmee" is now opening in U.S. theaters and is available on Region 2 Blu-ray.)¹
Talk about blissful: Apichatpong's pictures (say that five times real fast) are awake and alive to the joy of existence like few others I've seen. Sorry if that sounds too, you know, giddily "life-affirming," but I feel like Joe's movies sharpen and expand my senses while I'm watching them -- not unlike the peak experiences/memories I've had in the garden, or walking in the woods with my dogs, when I feel I'm living more intensely, soaking up more of the life within and around me. And in the case of these movies, there's the added thrill of Joe framing it all! What can I say? Apichatpong movies make me very happy. (They're really funny, too.)
Few other films or filmmakers have stirred this kind of awe-mixed-with-happiness in me. Seeing "2001: A Space Odyssey" at age 11 was the first time I can recall. (Joe's last three films have reminded me of various sections of that movie, in which you feel you're experiencing something both primally human and alien at the same time.) Wim Wenders' "Kings of the Road" also explores what I called, upon first seeing it in the late 1970s, "the strange familiarity of unfamiliar places" -- that feeling of entering a/the world that's both new and intimately recognizable, uncanny and ordinary. I get it from the Coens sometimes -- in "No Country for Old Men" and "A Serious Man," especially -- and Terence Malick ("Days of Heaven," "The New World") taps into it occasionally, too. It has something to do with the light, the air, the shapes, the sounds, the extraordinary mythology of the everyday seen with new eyes (yours, through Joe's).
I read somewhere that Joe likes to read critical interpretations of his movies, because Thai criticism offers little more than descriptions. (He's not very well-known at home.) The thing is, his movies are as challenging to describe as they are to interpret. They're bursting with ideas and associations (in some ways I think of them, structurally, like the endlessly zoomable fractal images in that famous 1995 Arthur C. Clarke PBS documentary about the Mandelbrot Set, "Colors of Infinity")... but maybe our best attempts to subjectively explain how they look and feel is all the interpretation they require.
"Uncle Boonmee" starts with a black bovid tied to a tree at night (or deep-blue day-for-night). I was in love with the film before the end of this almost-wordless (but for the call, "Keow!") opening. The close ups and vocalizations of the animal are enchanting enough, but by the time s-he pulls free and runs across a field of tall grass toward the jungle, I was in heaven. Why? Well, because of the beauty of the movement (something in the way s-he moves...) and the nightsounds and the color and the composition. Later a character who should know says that "Heaven is overrated." Watching and listening to this movie -- for all its bugs and pests and sorrows and ailments, accompanied by unimagined wonders -- you tend to believe her. (She indirectly confirms David Byrne's assessment that it is a place where nothing ever happens. Here, by the edge of the jungle, everything is always happening.)
There are visual and aural effects in Apichatpong's movies -- some of them are natural landscapes, but also actual post-production work -- that (as I said after I first visited Pandora) make the vaunted blue-cheese world of "Avatar" look like a kitschy fiber-optic lamp in a strip-mall Thai restaurant. This is especially funny because Joe frequently evokes that whimsically plastic aspect of Thai popular culture in his films: the flashy temple lights and karaoke restaurant in "Uncle Boonmee," or the cave shrine that plays a Christmas carol in "Tropical Malady." The most awesome images in Joe's films are so deceptively simple they seem utterly natural: a tree alight with fireflies, the ghost of an animal rising from its body and entering the jungle, the confrontation between a man and a tiger, a solar eclipse, a piece of ductwork that inhales fog, red-eyed humanoids in the dense foliage, star-fields on the interior walls of a cave...
Ghosts appear, in one form or another, throughout these films -- quite strikingly during one memorable evening in "Uncle Boonmee" -- but they seem more an extension of the known world than an intrusion of the supernatural, as in some Western and Far Eastern ghost stories. Joe has expressed his affection for traditional Thai horror movies, and although I've never seen one, I wonder if they're more about the frisson than the "Boo!" (He says they are usually funny, also.)
But back to the "interpretation" stuff: Uncle Boonmee does not recall his past lives for us. The film itself does, but not by announcing "flashbacks." The lives simply appear, as in the opening, or a scene by a waterfall (think of those framed and lighted waterfall motion scenes) with a princess and a catfish. We aren't led into these recollections, if that's what they are (and, by the way, would Uncle Boonmee be the cow or the man, the catfish or the princess?); they are just part of the tapestry of the film, as are ghost-memories of certain Boonmee relatives. When Joe speaks in interviews (and the commentary track for "Tropical Malady") of his diaristic desire to make movies that chronicle his personal memories, his use of the word "memories" seems to include fantasy and imagination and dreams -- which are also the stuff memories are made of. (In an essay called "Ghosts in the Darkness," he quotes Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the subject of art that grows from "our desire to remember": "The memory is clear but there is no possibility that it is true." That's a resonant summation of the Apichatpong sensibility.)
Above: From "Tropical Malady" (2004)
Joe likes to weave his memories -- and past movies -- together in ways that are more oblique than, say, Kiarostami, who has made films that are explicitly about (or based upon) the making of his past films (as in the "Koker Trilogy"). Except for the quasi-doc "Mysterious Object at Noon," none of Joe's features offers a version of the director playing himself or a character based on him. Instead, the films are linked by recurring actors and characters and incidents. Tommy, the motorcycle-rider of "Blissfully Yours," is disposed of off-screen (with a sound) and shows up as a corpse (with the same underwear) at the beginning of "Tropical Malady." Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), the lover/tiger of "Tropical Malady," reappears in as a Buddhist monk (with a different name) in "Syndromes," and again at the tamarind ranch as Uncle Boonmee's nephew named Tong, who later becomes a monk. Pa Jane (Jenjira Pongpas), who has one leg shorter than the other, reappears as Aunt Jen in "Uncle Boonmee." And might the cave that Keng is afraid to explore with Tong in "Tropical Malady" be an antechamber of the womblike one Uncle Boonmee visits with his dead wife Huay, Aunt Jen and Tong? Joe has said he weaves these connections into his movies because they are personally important to him. He sees the films themselves as intertwined memories.
So many of my favorite films tend to be movies that are, on some level(s), about the process of memory: "Sansho Dayu," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Letter From an Unknown Woman," "No Country for Old Men," "Vertigo," "Days of Heaven," "Our Hospitality," "Cutter's Way," "That Obscure Object of Desire," "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "Housekeeping," "The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2," "L'Eclisse," "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," "Sunset Boulevard," "Once Upon a Time in the West," "Once Upon a Time in America," "The Singing Detective" (Jon Amiel), "Last Year at Marienbad"... "Tropical Malady," "Syndromes and a Century" and "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" now join their company.
There I go again. OK, how do I interpret "Uncle Boonmee" -- and is that something I really want to do (or should do)? Well, I can start by saying that the movie is not bifurcated like "Blissfully Yours" (city/country), "Tropical Malady" (city/jungle, romantic comedy/mythic journey) or "Syndromes and a Century (rural/urban), in which the second part transforms and recapitulates aspects of the first. "Uncle Boonmee" is fairly linear, occasionally looping back into other stories from (we assume) Boonmee's past, or perhaps a ghost or a spirit or a creature with a tale to tell.
Above: Watching the play of the light -- out the windows, through the curtains, and inside the room itself, sunlight glowing on the shirt of the medical assistant....
Uncle Boonmee is slowly dying of renal failure, and ghosts from his past seem to be coming back to help him tie up loose ends and make the transition to the next realm. He puts his affairs in order, considers the future in this world after he's no longer around, and watches as his past lives rise up before him. That's about it. The jungle is death and the jungle is alive (like the woods in "Twin Peaks," though less overtly sinister). Life evolves and we watch it go through its changes even while we're in the middle of it, passing through it, on our way out of it.
Some kind of displacement -- physical, spiritual, psychological -- is happening in several of the characters, who sometimes behave as though they're watching themselves from outside their own bodies. Nobody is terribly perturbed to encounter dead relatives or Spirit Monkeys or flirtatious catfish. And why should they be? Similar material about the divided nature of consciousness in the hands of, say, David Lynch would be nightmarish and fraught with horror ("Lost Highway," "Mulholland Dr.," "Inland Empire"). Joe, on the other hand, emphasizes the continuities rather than the divisions and regards it all with a sense of wonder, more amused than bemused.
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¹ "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000), an Exquisite Corpse-inspired experiment, and "Blissfully Yours" (2002) are also mesmerizing in different ways.
UPDATE (04/25/11): I was dismayed that nobody cared to share my love for "Uncle Boonmee" in comments. Tonight I learned that, for reasons unknown, this entry has not been accepting them. And they weren't in the spam filter, either. So, I've asked the Sun-Times tech folks to see if they can fix it. If you tried to post before, please try again. Uncle Boonmee needs you...
UPDATE (04/26/11): Comments now working!
9 Comments
D'OH! And just now I read the "update" explaining the zero comments problem. Durrrrrr....
Jim,
This is a lovely tribute to UNCLE BONMEEE, my favorite film of 2010. The film creates uncanny feelings, as you said, and speaks on completely different terms to those familiar with Apichatpong's cinema and those whose first film by him is UNCLE BOONMEE.
Here's what I wrote about it (pardon the plug):
"That Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the greatest feature by the Thai director is only worthy of a footnote. It is, in fact, what Nathaniel Dorsky calls Devotional Cinema. Boonmee is a work that amalgamates the process of film, human metabolism and the intermittence of our being like no other. Treating life as one continuous entity without a beginning or an end, where death and reincarnation are just various modes of existence, Boonmee so lovingly examines how these modes are integral to functioning of film where, in each frame, the past dies, yet persists and projects itself into the future. Furthermore, the film is also Weerasethakul’s response to the recent upheavals in his country where the political past of the country seems to resist death, reincarnating itself in kindred happenings of the present. Weerasethakul’s picture is at once a tribute to national cinema of the past, an elegy for film and a welcome note to digital filmmaking. It is at once a return to nascence and a leap into the future. Uncle Boonmee is cinema. Uncle Boonmee is cinema."
And I still assert that Boonmee is a highly political film as well (alongside a hundred other dimensions), which is one reason why I suspect his subsequent films will be film essays and tone poems, that are more "disruptive" than BOONMEE. I can't see a reason to not get excited about.
Thanks for this review and cheers!
I don't remember my whole comment, but I do remember citing this quote from Robert Altman's appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972, and I think it directly relates to your reaction to Weerasethakul's films and the films themselves.
"I feel that the medium of film has not yet really been explored. In other words, I think that when we started film, we took it from theater, literature and we were an extension of another art form, and it’s still that way. It’s getting away from it, and I think eventually somebody will make a film that is purely a film, and the audience can respond to as such, and I don’t think it’s been done. I think it’s like a painting: an experience. The only limitations are the linear ones; it has length, it has a beginning and an end, it takes a certain amount of time. But I think that ideally, the audience can look at a film, emotionally get the whole thing, and not necessarily be able to explain it to somebody else."
My God how I long for this film. Cinema is alive and well and sparkling. Hopefully it will be coming to an arthouse near me soon, missed it the first time around (maybe the historic Colonial Theater, shooting location for the original Blob, will accept a suggestion for future programming).
I have not yet seen Uncle Boonmee, but I absolutely will as soon as it becomes available to me. I don't think it's an understatement to say that Weerasethakul is the man who made me a cinephile (with a fair amount of credit to Wong Kar-Wai, a discovery I made around the same time as Weerasethakul. Both taught me of the things film can communicate that go beyond plot and character.). His films are so alive with possibility and life that it makes me really feel a primal connection to the artform and its various methods of expression. I always come back to them if I need to remember why I praise cinema over all other arts.
That quote from Altman posted by Nick is quite apt, as I feel Weerasethakul is one of the few directors working to push cinema into a purely filmic experience. And it's that assured experimentalism that makes me continue to love him and his films. I can't wait to see Uncle Boonmee.
In Uncle Boonmee, Boonmee (Mr. Saisaymar) longs to be embraced by his wife, longs to be enveloped by her arms. He hugs her bosom, seeking the peace what a child seeks in his mother. When he’s dead he only worries if we would get to be with his wife. All of us have been there. All of us long for its warmth. There’s Jai, Boonmee’s worker, an illegal immigrant from Lao. He wishes to return home to marry his girl. And there’s Boonmee son, a photographer. The province Uncle Boonmee is set in, the village where Uncle Boonmee lives, the village that caused the Primitive Project, is probably immaterial here. Should be as well. It is a village, and a world unto its own. The son, Boonsong (Mr. Kulhong), ventures into the woods, comes across strange beings He ventures into their world, finds himself a woman, falls in love with her, and for her, becomes one of them. We all know those kinds.
What does Apichatpong intend to say here?
I might be playing the skeptic here, but then Uncle Boonmee does provide me with a last hour concerned preaching that fills me a certain degree of suspicion. Till that hour, Uncle Boonmee is Uncle Boonmee, but then somehow it seems, the God is not so much concerned with its devotee as much it is concerned with him becoming a mouthpiece, or a martyr. We experience the simplicities of the rural, the easy access, the primitivist pleasures. Uncle Boonmee’s son has chosen a life that literally follows a primitive course, and as Boonmee recalls a dream, that seems to identify itself as a set of images from a light and sound machine, he sees himself as a relic from the past, and this machine as a relic from the future. It is a dream, where a man is sent to the future, and his past is recalled by the machine. The past, the present and the future converge, all at the same end. In its form, and in its theme, it is tough not to be reminded of Chris Marker’s La jetée.
Mr. Weerasethakul has mentioned that Uncle Boonmee serves as an ode to film too, and as more and more filmmakers are adopting the ease of the digital format, the good old fashioned film projector with its reels is now an endangered species. I respect the nostalgia, but then, I am not sure I approve of the prejudice one feels for the new technology. Whenever I’m reminded of the lost Welles’ cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, I tell to myself how democratic our medium as become, and with a transformation in its form (from film to digital), it no longer is the slave to the authoritarian tendencies of a capitalistic organization. Is the medium becoming more socialist? Probably. X-Men Origins: Wolverine would’ve never happened, and I would never have been writing about this film were it not for this exponential shift towards the socialist end of the spectrum. I believe, the medium of ours is getting more personal than ever before.
For a film of faith, and Uncle Boonmee is a film of supreme faith, it is strange that it contains such a pessimistic view of the future. Can true faith work without optimism? I don’t know, and I often see this contradiction in a lot of places. Uncle Boonmee believes in its God and in its land of mystical possibilities, where the cave with its apes and constellations reminds one of 2001: A Space Odyssey and probable alien contact, where the country and the political boundaries are of no real or practical concern, and where death is not a full stop, but merely an exclamation point, and ancestors and death and the living and the past and the present all live together existing within the same frame. It takes it all for a fact. And yet, it is so glum about the future. The modern generation of e-mails and credit cards and pop music is apparently so far from true spirituality that even a night of monkhood is tough, and where the existence is restless without money or television or hustle and bustle. The spirituality of the mystic land doesn’t exist. The faith to wait for one’s son to return for years doesn’t exist. What exists is the hard facts of reality – the military rule, the political boundaries, the corruption. In that way it is a thematic partner to whatever Mr. Sorkin intended for The Social Network.
When we were kids, me and my brother once had a wall of our drawing room swarming with little ants. It was a Saturday morning, I believe, and we pulled our slippers and went absolutely berserk with our stamping. For days after that, I remember, I felt I had seen the apparition of an ant. I thought it was the soul of it. I wasn’t feeling guilty, but the apparition was a reminder of my guilt. I have killed numerous cockroaches, and rats, and mosquitoes and flies, often in great excitement, but then that murderous rampage is the only image my memory always serves me with. I’ve been brought up in the urban world, and all I guess there’s mysticism and spirituality and optimism to be felt within the reality of our existence.
Unfortunately, I can't comment on "Uncle Boonmee" specifically, but I want to send a thank you to you, Jim, for publishing these recent articles on Joe. I've been avoiding his films without any definite reason, and your posts have prompted me to take interest. So far, "Syndromes and a Century" was a very rewarding experience, and "Mysterious Object at Noon" less so. I'll be going through the rest of his films hopefully in time for the home video release of "Uncle Boonmee".
The film didn't work for me at all. There are certainly striking sequences, such as the stills sequence combining the monkey ghosts and the military men.
But any human characters (Uncle Boonmee specifically) struck me as acting in ways unmotivated at best, completely devoid of humanity at worst. The film does not provide the human grounding (empathy?) that Syndromes or Tropical Malady handled well, even within their detached wide-angle frames.
The spirituality is on-the-nose and in-your-face, so much so that Uncle Boonmee sees no reason to fear death because definitive proof of an afterlife decides (for an utterly arbitrary reason) to appear at dinner. How can we, mere humans, possibly relate to this portrayal of mortality? Boonmee's subsequent "passing over" is handled as a rote chore rather than with genuine humanism.
Take this kind of dialogue exchange:
"Did you hear our prayers?"
"Yes."
"What about the trinkets we left at your grave?"
"I felt them."
If this wasn't some Thai exoticism and was instead a Western religion, would the critical establishment put up with this uncritical examination of death? I doubt it, and rightfully so.
Without a motivated human presence and minus a brain, Uncle Boonmee hopes to razzle dazzle with visuals and sounds. It's sorta the blockbuster equivalent for arthouse cinema.
Jim - as a fellow northwesterner who has lived in Thailand for the past number of years, I found "Uncle Boonmee" to be more than 'strangely familiar' in that the landscapes, colors, language, and magical realism for those obvious reasons - my (Thai) wife's hometown is very, very similar to Uncle Boonmee's home, and some of the details used were strangely empathetic for me (my 60 year-old father-in-law is currently on kidney dialysis).
It's interesting to note how would Thais respond to this film - my wife no doubt would find the opening images immediately beyond her taste (she's a Bruce Willis fan) but, then again, Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams" (a film this resembles in startling ways) is one of our favorites together. "Boonmee" has a magic that can tame even the most arduous action fan if you give yourself over to it. It is also helpful to note that the default "assumptions" of magic by the characters in the film isn't Apichatpong *necessarily* operating as a Bunuelian surrealist....for almost every Thai household has a well-tended "spirit house" at the entrance where ghosts (be they friendly or not) must be catered to daily in order to keep their haunting ways at bay. This makes the appearance of the monkey ghost and Boonmee's wife startling to the characters, but note how after five minutes the phenomenon is more or less old news, and the three human characters are talking about this and that and the other thing, the ghost kind of silently sulking at being rather ignored for all his red, piercing pupils.
IOne thing worth noting too is the *extreme* cynicism Thais can have towards monks in general. Because monkdom is a process Thai boys go through as commonly as Jewish boys do their bar mitzvah, and go back to when it is necessary (times of death, etc.) it has become a matter of cultural strain and light rebellion (the beautiful way those final scenes play out are note-perfect in how Thais would react to such a thing - the audience, no doubt, playfully hissing and giggling at the knowing awkwardness of seeing a monk disrobe in front of two females, related or not).
I love this film, although I confess I'm not sure if its one I'd be ready to give another go too quickly.....the images are drawn out and are given time and respect to linger onscreen, so the impressions last. It's not a complex film at all, but one that has a lovely residual effect. I just don't have immediate enthusiasm to see it again right now - maybe for the above reasons?
Anyways, thanks for the "Boonmee" article and sharing your delight with this work - I hope the Cannes recognition will help get Thailand's art-house film industry off the ground the way it has in other Asian countries.
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