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