Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

Viewed at the Festival du Film, Cannes 2010 I saw this film with two friends at the evening, red carpet screening in Cannes. Lucky us, right? Well, no. The walk-outs began about six minutes in and continued unabated. My two companions both fell asleep! I managed to stay awake, although I tried otherwise, and when A and B both woke some 45 minutes later, we also joined the line for the exit. I realise a film is always a personal experience, but there is absolutely no story on show here, no character establishment or development. The camera lingers and busks to the point that you are mentally screaming "CUT!! CUT!!"! Whole interminable scenes do nothing to drive a non-existent narrative forwards. Visually, it often looks like it was shot on mini-DV and mastered through an unwashed milk bottle. As for the characters, especially Uncle Boonmee, do we get to know him? What do you think? Do we even care? What do you think again? The best thing about this film is, I kid you not, an electric fly swatter! Now that's something I want! It won the Palme D'Or, of course.

Fmovies: This years Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, "Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives" is the story of a man who is dying, and as result recalls his past lives and is visited by ghosts and spirits.

There are ape spirit creatures who lives in the forest attracted by his sickness, he remembers being an ox and a princess, we watch a nurse drain some device the ailing Boonme wears fixed to his abdomen.

This was the first film I watched at 2010's AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles, and it was a start that was not followed easily. The film is strange but the words which feel most appropriate to the film are "gentle" and "mysterious".

Boonme's final days are spent with his sister and a nurse and their various supernatural guests. They eat dinner, watch films, look at photo albums, life unfolds but with an awareness of a mysterious shift coming. As death approaches, past lives and those human, animal, or other appear ever-shifting and inter connected, foreign but also familiar, like relatives returned after a long absence."Uncle Boonme" is the final part of a multi-platform project featuring art installations and short films called "The Primitive Installation", about Nabua, Thailand a region heavily occupied by the Thai army from the 60's to the 80's. "Uncle Boonme" believes his karma is the result of the part he played in the violence of the past.Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul ("Joe" for short) has created a landscape of shadowy jungles, intimate bedroom lighting, a haunting, funny, dreamy, and wise, rhythmic lamentation about modern life, it's "primitive" counter points, death, change, spirit-monkeys and all that good stuff.

Uncle Boonme is a fantasy as epic as Souleymane Cisse's "Yeelen", one luminous to look at and visually wander through, with several of "Tropical Malady's"' most hallucinatory moments, appearing strong early in it's opening movements and closing out on notes as elliptical as those of "Syndromes And A Century", and then there's the final scene compressed into a wonderful kind of epilogue involving a monk, that's the most audacious, fascinating, and best of it's sort since Wes Anderson's "Hotel Chevalier"."

Transformations and contrasts between the ancient and the modern flow into one another from electronic bug zappers to sex with talking cat- fish, primordial caves to karaoke bars. Dual and multiple-roles and states within a single whole, are a recurring theme in the film, so multiple meanings and readings being generated is little surprise. But though these thoughts rise up haunting us after viewing, the images of movement through Nabua's phantom jungles and Boonme's warm goodbyes are what we are left feeling and reeling with.

All modern worlds are built on ancient ones, all new things have within them older forms. "Uncle Boonme" is more informed by Buddhist notions of reincarnation, the idiosyncratic personality of it's creator and the psycho-geography of it's location, more than normal concerns about dramatic and character arc. In simpler words...an old man who is dying can recall his past lives.

The film is a matter of perception as complex and post- modernist/globalized as any experimental narrative in avant-garde-dom or as mystical and "primitive" as any ancient Sutra, based on the cultural inclinations and presuppositio

"Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me." This quote appears on the screen at the start of the film and is indicative of what we'll see. Uncle Boonmee is a farm owner in rural Thailand, up in the hills, and is dying of kidney disease. In this period of his life visions of past incarnations and other supernatural visions will appear to him. The movie is staggeringly and outrageously beautiful, whether it's the way light is falling on coloured mosquito nets in a darkened room or its fractured scatter on a quartz cavern, or a vision of a palanquined princess seen through veils, being carried through a susurrating forest on a narrow track.

Apitchatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's profound respect for life comes through well in the film. A recurring theme in his films are medical scenes with the long term ill. This is apparently because he grew up in a hospital, both his parents being doctors, and so he was very used to seeing sick people. The scenes where Boonmee requires dialysis are therefore very easy and compassionate. The whole movie has a great gentleness as regards mise-en-scene. You just can't get enough of this stuff, simple human scenes where people cuddle and care for one another. I like also how darker things are dealt with elliptically, for example a water buffalo at the start which breaks free of it's tether, but realises after wandering in the forest that it has nowhere to go and no role to play out. Docile it returns with the farmer who has gone out looking for it. I take that as being allegorical, with the dark hulk representing a human spirit in anguish, though the straight up incarnation viewpoint is obviously affecting too. One thing Joe said in his Q&A after the film is that he's very keen on individual interpretations of the film, of which he has seen many types, so come prepared and be a creative watcher! Boonmee believes he is ill because he killed too many communists and also too many bugs on his farm (via the use of chemical pesticides). So the idea of karma runs through the movie as well. A spirit in the movie talks about heaven and says that it's overrated, and that nothing ever happens there. I found that quite funny (the movie is frequently amusing), because I've always thought of the view of heaven by the Abrahamic religions as quite problematic, that none of them can really make sense of it, of how to frame life once life is gone, once the struggle is over.

There's homage in the film to the movies that Apitchatpong grew up watching, and understanding that this is intentional may help to explain some rather odd special effects. I think as well is helps to have a knowledge of Thai current events and a little history, especially with the final scenes.

Quite incredibly special, like Katie, who this is for.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives fmovies. I'll be frank. Whether or not you enjoy this movie will depend largely on whether or not you are a die hard film buff or a casual movie goer looking for a story. If you are the later, then aside from the eerie sight of the red eyed Monkey Spirits, you will come away disappointed.

That said, there is much in Uncle Boonmee to like, but like the Buddhist aesthetic the film is steeped in, you have to be ready for it. Because this is one film that demands a lot of patience of the viewer.

Set in rural Isan Province, Thailand, the story follows the last days of a well to-do farmer, the titular Boonmee, who is dying of a terminal illness. Like all dying men, Boonmee can't help but wax philosophic, both on the nature of death itself and on his own past mistakes, and one night while eating with his family is suddenly and abruptly joined by two spirits, the first of his dead wife, Huay, the second that of his missing son, Boonsong, who has inexplicably been transformed into a black monkey. Anyone even remotely familiar with the prior work of Director Weerasethakul (try saying that with a mouthful of marbles), particularly Tropical Malady, will know that such surrealism is a common theme in his films, with its signature mix of traditional Thai Buddhism and animist lore. As in Tropical Malady, the day belongs to the living and the mundane, but night brings on ghosts, animal spirits, the shades of ancestors, and the inner musings and anxieties of Weerasethakul's characters.

The film itself feels much like a Buddhist temple; with its long uninterrupted and unadorned shots, and its devotion to capturing trivial moments, it is not so much a vehicle for storytelling as contemplation. The last film to be shot with celluloid as opposed to digital, it is the director's self-admitted funerary ode to a dying medium.

Incoherent, unpredictable, mystical, yet undoubtedly original, "Uncle Boonmee Who Call Recall His Past Lives" is a pseudo-profound cinematic venture that reeks with allegory and mythical undertones. After watching this film, I've come to a conclusion that it is certainly not for everyone.

Despite its strange recurring themes about supernatural beings, spirits, Buddhist philosophy, karma, and reincarnation, it will bathe you with its gentleness and natural ornateness. It is intimate and surprisingly elegant, though not without its flaws.

Much like Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life," this motion picture lacks a linear narrative. It doesn't have what most of us would require from a movie: a plot. It heavily relies on hypnotic images captured into still wide frames that often drag longer than the easily-bored viewer can bear.

Then there's the noticeable absence of a musical score. You never get to hear music until the last few minutes of the film; all you'll hear besides the dialogues are crickets, the rustling of leaves, a water buffalo, the sound of an electric fly swatter zapping flying bugs, footsteps, a waterfall, and a talking catfish that made love to a disfigured princess.

Simple and ambitious; primitive and modern; eerie and comforting; senseless and driven; and dull and brilliant, this Thai film gives you a one-of-a-kind viewing experience. If you are into esoteric art films, this is something I would highly recommend. If you loathe movies that seem to have no meaning, then this is not for you.

Confounding as it is, "Uncle Boonmee..." is a film that doesn't need to be understood; it simply has to be FELT.

This is one of the finest films I have seen all year and I am certain that this film will stay with you for a long, long time.

Uncle Boonmee belongs to a category of films that harks back to the days of the invention of the moving image; when audience members were stunned in disbelief to see pictures and images in motion. The dawn of cinema came about as an experience and a work of art, much like a painting that people could experience and interpret how they liked. It is great to see film makers in todays commercial age still holding on to that vision and delivering the same.

The story, if there is one, is about the protagonist Boonmee who, close to the end of his current life, recollects how this one went by, with the help of ghosts and spirits of the forest where he lives. He has the ability to go back and forth into his past and future lives and relate his memories.

The movie, like other mood-pieces, can be fairly divisive with its audience. People who are not prepared for it will be left confounded whereas a small minority for whom the movie is made will leave the cinema stunned at the experience of it all. Therefore, this movie should rather be called an experience instead of a movie.

It is a little surprising that it won the Palm D'Or at Cannes, but not because it does not deserve it, but because it surprises me that the judges actually saw the beauty behind it. I say this one deserves the award more than the others did.