Screen Machine

Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s three feature films prior to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (I can’t speak for Mysterious Object at Noon having not seen it yet) all feature a moment of disjuncture – usually at about the halfway point of the film – that pulls the rug out from under the spectator, a moment in which we become suddenly aware of the sheer alienness of the work, a moment that challenges us to change our spectatorial habits. I can’t describe these moments in the customary way i.e. as Brechtian “distancing” effects. The image of Weerasethakul is not that of the confrontational political ideologue who destroys reality to perceive truth. Rather, the part he plays is more that of a gay man seducing a straight man. The point of his cinema is to quite winningly convince us to make that qualitative leap into the unknown.

I’m talking about such moments like the glorious pop song and title sequence that abruptly intrudes upon Blissfully Yours, that long moment of blackness in Tropical Malady after which the narrative of the film’s first half is abandoned and the cut in Syndromes and a Century that triggers the almost shot-for-shot retelling of the film’s story in another time and another place. Uncle Boonmee’s main departure from these films is that it is not cut clean in half. There are, rather, several such disjunctive moments in Weerasethakul’s latest – The odd introduction of the supernatural (in the form of ghosts and talking monkeys) into scenes that otherwise play as exercises in neorealism; an unexplained departure from the main narrative to tell a folk story about a woman having sex with a catfish; a sequence of still images of young men in military attire goofing around or acting out various scenarios whose precise connection with the film remains mysterious; and, happily, another great pop song (“Acrophobia” by Penguin Villa) that plays over the film’s final moments and into the credits.

That Uncle Boonmee has been so widely hyped and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes does not, for me, signify that it is a masterpiece as distinct from his other work. The praise that Weerasethakul has received recently is praise that may be applied to his entire oeuvre, to his artistic practice as a whole. It’s attention that is well-deserved too. With Uncle Boonmee – with each new work in fact – Weerasethakul restores meaning to the word “imagination”. In these times when the imagination is receding in all spheres of life – artistic, political, spiritual – the designation of works as “imaginative” generally applies in a very limited way to large commercial spectacles. What is clear though is that such imagination can only find “success” by being wedded to traditional forms. One need not look far for examples. How does one explain the stubborn insistence on Lady Gaga’s “eccentricity” when, to be quite frank, her music does not exhibit a fraction of the creativity of Neptunes-era Britney Spears? How does one account for Inception being dubbed a work of “innovation” when its main achievement lay in its classical employment of old genres and narratives?

With Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul once again reminds us that one can make a true break with the known into the unknown, a break that is key to our redemption. What is fascinating about Weerasethakul is that the unknown remains unknown; that is, the quality of mystery in Weerasethakul’s work is not that of a mystery that can be solved as in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation but the eternal mystery immanent to reality. This attitude towards the unknown accounts for the constant transformations of Weerasethakul as an artist. Take for example his treatment of the jungle. The point for him is not to “work out” what the jungle signifies. He has, throughout his career, continued to requestion and redefine what the jungle means to him as an artist. In Blissfully Yours, the jungle is desire; in Tropical Malady, fear; in Uncle Boonmee, the jungle is the home that protects one’s radical becoming like the adolescent fortress of solitude that Brian Wilson and Gary Usher described in The Beach Boys’ song “In My Room”:

There’s a world where I can go
And tell my secrets to
In my room…

So here is why I am eagerly awaiting Weerasethakul’s next sure-to-be-masterpiece: I am pretty certain that when he emerges from the jungle and presents his next film, we will see something we truly haven’t seen before.

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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