Like The Tree of Life, which won the Cannes Palm d'Or prize this year, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the winner of last year's Palm d'Or, is beautiful, slow, and weird as hell. It boggles the mind, but Uncle Boonmee actually has less of a coherent plot than The Tree of Life. This is not to say that a thin or non-existent plot is inherently wrong, it just means that films like these aren't really meant for entertainment purposes. But when does a movie cross the line from being unusual and unique, to incoherent and weird for the sake of being weird? That's a line viewers must draw for themselves.
I was quick to praise The Tree of Life, giving it 4.5 stars on this blog, not because I enjoyed it immensely, but because I thought it was beautiful and figured "Hey, it must be important!". Well, I'm kind of rethinking my position. Tree of Life, like Uncle Boonmee, is certainly a unique vision that blasts right through the conventions of film, and I admire that. Both films must mean...something. But they are so personal to their respective directors and so symbolic and so out there that it seems impossible to make sense of what the films are trying to tell us. In addition, Uncle Boonmee is a Thai film. At least with Tree of Life, I understood the American tropes of small town suburbia and the nuclear family. I almost don't want to try to interpret Uncle Boonmee since I have so little knowledge of the culture and traditions it came from.
So I won't try. Instead, I'll briefly explain the plot of Uncle Boonmee and a few personal impressions I got from it. The film centers around the titular Boonmee, a man in his early 60's who is dying of kidney failure. His sister-law-comes to live with him and take care of him during his final days. In addition, the ghost of Boonmee's long-dead wife arrives (everyone, not just Boonmee, can see her) as well as Boonmee's long-missing son, who, after mating with a female monkey ghost, has become a monkey ghost himself--covered in black hair, with red, glowing eyes.
Then there is a random interlude where a woman (played--I think--by the same woman who plays Boonmee's sister) goes down to a waterfall and has sex with a catfish. Yes, this actually happens.
Eventually, Boonmee and his family travel to a cave that Boonmee says is "like a womb". He passes away. After his funeral, Boonmee's sister and her niece are counting the money they received from friends and family after Boonmee passed on. Brother Tong, a monk, stops by to take a shower. He and Boonmee's sister go out to get food...but actually, their spirits go out to get food while their bodies remain in the hotel room.
The end.
Some observations and thoughts:
* Certain scenes, including the crazy-ass catfish sex scene, are beautifully filmed and have a poetic quality to them. The scene I liked the most was when Boonmee's dead wife holds him as he asks her where his spirit should go to look for her after he dies.
* There is a theme of interconnectedness that runs through the film. If there is one idea or concept that can be extracted from Uncle Boonmee, it's that the line between this life and the afterlife, as well as the line between animals and humans, are paper thin. This movie is full of ghosts, monkey-ghost-humans, out of body experiences, and inter-species mating. It's all very weird, but also kind of interesting how the director blurs the lines between boundaries that are otherwise set in stone.
* The movie is very slow. The camera holds on certain scenes or landscapes for minutes at a time. I actually shaved off a few minutes of the movie by fastforwarding through the slow parts. Hey! Don't judge me! I didn't want to miss the beginning of The Daily Show.
* According to Wikipedia, the director explains: " the film is primarily about "objects and people that transform or hybridise". A central theme is the transformation and possible extinction of cinema itself. The film consists of six reels each shot in a different cinematic style. The styles include, by the words of the director, "old cinema with stiff acting and classical staging", "documentary style", "costume drama" and "my kind of film when you see long takes of animals and people driving".
Ok, now that's kind of interesting to me. A meditation on death that is also a meta-meditation of the "death" of cinema. But is cinema dying? Or is it, and our expectations of it, evolving? If movies like Uncle Boonmee and The Tree of Life are winning awards, doesn't this show that visionary film and mash-ups of different genres are celebrated now? Does that equal death? Who knows. All I know is that I can't puzzle out what Uncle Boonmee means all on my own. It's an interesting film, for sure, but like the art of Sergej Jensen, Uncle Boonmee is too minimal and too unusual for many people understand or care about.
2.5 stars for enjoyment
3.5 stars for artistic vision
Also, I think director Apichatpong Weerasethakul may have ripped off the Guerrilla Girls with his depictions of the monkey ghosts.
Guerrilla Girls
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