Old Yorker

  • Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Loong Boonmee raleuk chat

    Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2010)

    At the start of the film a voiceover says (something like):  ‘I stood on the hill and watched my past lives rising towards me’.   Then a buffalo slips its tether and goes down to drink water from a pond or river.  There’s no word for this sequence but magical.  As you’re watching and listening to the animal lapping water in near darkness, you really seem to feel what it’s like to exist as this buffalo.  You believe for a moment that it is one of the previous incarnations being referred to by the speaker.   Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives contains other beautiful and mysterious sequences: a princess having sex with a catfish; a confusion of stars in the sky and lights in a cave, in the scene in which the title character dies (he has terminal kidney disease which he regards as his karma, for having killed too many communists).  When the ghost of his wife first appears at the table where Boonmee and his visiting relatives are eating, she’s not an ethereal presence although she hasn’t the same materiality as the other diners.  When she appears again to Boonmee alone, she’s more corporeal, interacting physically with him and the objects in the scene.    In the final sequence of the film, after Boonmee’s death and those who visited him in rural Thailand have returned to the city, we see them in a hotel room.    The young monk and the younger woman in this trio appear to go out to a restaurant; then we go back to them in the hotel room with the older woman.  They’re watching television and we get the impression they didn’t go to the restaurant after all:

    ‘What might have been and what has been
    Point to one end, which is always present.’

    I don’t know if Uncle Boonmee counts as ‘slow cinema’ according to the academic meaning of the term.  It’s slow in the obvious sense of the word.  You have plenty of time to admire the visual and sonic compositions and combinations.   I’m pleased I saw the film but it’s pointless to pretend that I understood what Apichatpong Weerasethakul was trying to do.   I’m currently approaching the closing stages of an introduction to Zen Buddhism by D T Suzuki (very short but I’ve been reading it a few pages at time, for weeks), not much wiser than when I started.  I read a piece in Sight & Sound about the importance of Zen to Weerasethakul and the admiring reviews of the film encourage you to ‘give yourself up’ to the beguiling flow of images and sounds.  I’m not sure if bringing a Zen sensibility to bear on the film and suspending a what-does-it-mean approach are the same thing but I can’t do either.   When Boonmee and his dead wife talk about heaven and spirits and he sadly asks her where he’ll find her when he’s dead, I wanted to hear her answer and was frustrated that Weerasethakul cut away at this point.

    Boonmee’s long-disappeared son also returns in the last days of his father’s current life – a hairy, black, red-eyed creature which seems to belong in a different kind of film but, according to quotes from the writer-director on Wikipedia, this may be the point:

    ‘… 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”. Apichatpong further explained in an interview with Bangkok Post: “When you make a film about recollection and death, you realise that cinema is also facing death. Uncle Boonmee is one of the last pictures shot on film – now everybody shoots digital. It’s my own little lamentation”.’

    25 November 2010

  • Unbroken

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Angelina Jolie (2014)

    Angelina Jolie, directing her second dramatic feature, tells the true World War II survival story of a young Italian-American, Louis ‘Louie’ Zamperini.  As a nineteen-year-old, he represented the USA in track and field at the 1936 Olympics, finishing eighth in the 5000m.  He enlisted in the US Army Air Corps in September 1941; in May 1943, the B24 bomber of which he was a crew member crashed, following a mechanical failure, into the Pacific Ocean.  Zamperini and two others were the only survivors of the crash.  Floating on a life raft, they drank rainwater as best they could.  They caught fish and the occasional sea bird with their bare hands, and ate them raw.  One of the trio died after thirty-three days; fourteen days later, Zamperini and the B24 pilot ‘Phil’ Phillips were captured by the Japanese Navy.  A prisoner of war until August 1945, Zamperini was repeatedly tortured and beaten by his captors.  In his long life after World War II, he became a committed Christian and, mentored by Billy Graham, a well-known ‘inspirational speaker’.  Forgiveness was central to Zamperini’s Christianity and he practised what he preached, returning to Japan to visit men who had persecuted him a few years earlier and were now imprisoned as war criminals.  Zamperini published two war memoirs.  In 2010 a biography by Laura Hillenbrand, entitled Unbroken:  A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, became a bestseller and a prize-winner.  When his plane went down in 1943, Louis Zamperini was reported by the American military as missing presumed dead.  In the event, he passed away in July 2014, at the age of ninety-seven.

    Laura Hillenbrand’s book is the credited source for the screenplay of Unbroken and the authors of that screenplay are a big-name group – the Coen brothers, Richard LaGravenese (whose screenwriting credits include The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County and Behind the Candelabra) and William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Gladiator, Les Misérables, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom).  Did they all work together or were they involved consecutively – to try and rescue the script?  It’s hard to imagine a sensibility less naturally suited than the Coens’ to dramatising the struggles of an endlessly resilient man who, tempered by war, found God.  On the life raft, Louie promises that, if God will let him live, he will dedicate the rest of his life to Him.  From that point on, the idea of Louie’s being sustained through his ordeals by faith is conveniently unmentioned – until a closing legend on the screen, which explains that he was convinced that his prayers out at sea saved his life.  Beyond his family and his sweetheart back in New York, the Louis Zamperini of Jolie’s film doesn’t form any human relationships and the sequences involving these nearest and dearest are both clumsy and perfunctory.  A flashback to the Berlin Olympics is particularly feeble.  The family listen to a radio commentary on Louie’s race, register disappointment when the voice reports that he’s at the back of the 5000m field, leap in celebration when they discover … what?   It isn’t even clear where their boy has finished and impossible to believe that, even in accentuate-the-positive America, the family would go wild at the news that Louie has run a remarkably quick final lap (which allows him to pass some other stragglers).  The suggestion that the hero’s stamina on the running track anticipates the qualities of endurance he’ll need to show as a prisoner of the Japanese is crass.

    Zamperini and Phillips are held first at Kwajalein Atoll before being separated. (The latter isn’t seen again.)  Louie is transferred to the Omori camp in Tokyo and, when this is bombed by American forces in the closing stages of the war, to Naoetsu in Northern Japan.  Angelina Jolie presents an offensively skewed picture of life in both Omori and Naoetsu by having Louie singled out for punishment – received at the hands of a single sadist among the guards, the same man in both camps.  This man, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, is only a corporal at Omori before being promoted to sergeant and transferred to Naoetsu but, in spite of his modest military status (of which, it’s suggested, he’s bitterly resentful), he appears to have authority that goes unchallenged – and in spite of Watanabe’s increasingly unhinged behaviour.  There’s next to no suggestion either that any of Louie’s fellow prisoners suffered comparable violent maltreatment or that the essential structures and conditions of POW camps might have been conducive to sadistic acts or even routines.   Jolie’s coverage of the beatings and other punishments meted out to Louie Zamperini is certainly unflinching – so relentlessly explicit that you wonder if a male director might have been more discreet.  Part of Kathryn Bigelow’s achievement in The Hurt Locker was to make a war film that was tough-minded but not self-consciously so.  The same can’t be said for Angelina Jolie – her poor judgment here reminds you of what used sometimes to be said of Margaret Thatcher:  that her political personality – her ‘strong’ leadership – was exaggerated by a determination not to be seen as feminine in the soft-hearted sense of the word.  Jolie’s direction is often competent and she’s created with Roger Deakins some impressive war art images.  But you’re always conscious of the effort behind those images.  You’re rarely swept up in the story enough for the film’s technical accomplishments not to be uppermost in your mind.

    The shots of Louis Zamperini at the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics are so flabby that only a charismatic movie star face could animate them (someone like Mr Jolie in his youth).  I’m not sure that Jack O’Connell has such a face but he’s an excellent actor and, as Louie, he gives another involving, emotionally dynamic performance.  He evidently lost a considerable amount of weight here – even though, presumably as a result of the sequence in which the scenes were shot, his emaciation comes and goes.  Although I was longing for Unbroken to end for most of its 137 minutes, I was always looking forward to what O’Connell did next.  As Phillips, Domhnall Gleeson shows a similar fearless physical commitment.  You do wonder, though, why Jolie felt she had to go for non-Americans in both these roles.  Others in the cast who make an impression are Finn Wittrock, as the non-survivor of the life raft episode, and Garrett Hedlund, who’s almost too strong a presence for his role as one of the other POWs.  The evil guard Watanabe is played by the Japanese singer-songwriter Miyavi.  Jolie appears to be suggesting that Watanabe had furiously repressed homosexual feelings for Louie – a message conveyed by Miyavi’s androgynous face rather than his acting.

    8 January 2015

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