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Review - Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Thai director Api Weerasethakul's collaboration with European cinema
is perhaps the reason why this film was nominated at Cannes, but what is truly astonishing was that it beat 19 others in competition to win the coveted Palme d'or.
The film attempts to convey the essence of Thai culture, by
using a languid approach, with a series of lengthy set pieces, held
together with a single sound track.Making a liberal use of ghost images, both human, and animal,
we can understand these might be intended as an allegory: those
citizens who died in the military coups or as political prisoners, are
as forgotten as the ghost monkeys that inhabit the jungle in the remote
Northern Isaan area, close to the Laos border, where Uncle Boonmee has
his farm.
If we explore the meaning behind the film, we may also conclude that what the director is intending is to show us, is that we must add meaning to our lives or we will not find enlightenment. These are generous interpretations because these themes are ambiguous and not made particularly clear by the actions of the characters or any of the set plays.
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It is just as easy to conclude that this is a movie with no structured narrative that the director has filled with overly ambiguous, long, tedious and meaningless set-pieces that utterly fail to entertain.
It is one thing to have ghost monkeys in the woods, haunting the living, and the near dead (Uncle Boonmee who looks quite chipper actually) and quite another to have one sitting down for supper, and explaining how he was the spirit of their dead son, who ran off into the jungle one day to take photographs and then mated with a monkey, becoming a monkey ghost. This is, quite frankly, stupid.
There is a scene with a princess having sex with a catfish, which
has no connection to any part of the rest of the film, and is just
downright ridiculous - the essence of the film is hardly 'The Water
Margin' whatever the director may have intended. Uncle Boonmee does
not, at any time recall his past lives, so this is just a catchy title.
Despite his illness his family take him deep into the jungle, where he
dies in a cave. OK, so there is the interaction with karma, the land
and the animal spirits. But if that is what the film is about, why are
we subjected to a final 20 minutes of Auntie Jen and her daughter in a
hotel room counting money that has been given to them for Uncle
Boonmee's funeral? The son arrives, sneaking out from a monastery, gets
changed and has a shower. For no apparent reason the characters are
then duplicated on screen, and two go for a meal, whilst the other two
watch television. It would appear the director had run out of ideas long before then, but still had some film to use up.
1/10 Clueless
Review written by John Franklin : November 2010
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