Apichatpong Weerasethakuls Thai Palme dOr-winning film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is, for better or worse, not a film easily forgotten. What it all means, and what Weerasethakul was trying to say with Boonmee is difficult to describe, but the little certainty I have about this film is that it is not a might as clever or serene as it thinks it is, despite a few bursts of surreal, Lynchian humour. Whether whatever Weerasethakul was attempting to concoct has worked, Uncle Boonmee simply isnt very stimulating or entertaining; it was, for my money, 2010's most aggressively pretentious, critic-baiting and inaccessible film. Much like 2003s recipient of the prestigious Palme, Elephant, it is simply too sparse and self-indulgent for its own good despite some interesting moments. The titular Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is dying from a kidney disease, and has gathered with his family and friends including the ghosts of his deceased wife, Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), and his dead son, Boonsong (Jeerasak Julhong) - as he talks them through the past lives that he has supposedly lived. From the opening first shots of farmland animals staring at us, to the bemusing final ones, of characters sat on a bed, Uncle Boonmee is a highly elliptical, divisively esoteric film, as is the routine for Weerasethakuls work. The deliberately slow pace, rather than intimating a command of time and space as in the ethereal works of Kim ki-duk, is incredibly obnoxious; there is a lack of any recognisable pulse here, and simply Weerasethakul has not found a particularly compelling setting or group of people on which to base a feature. Things however do get more intersting once Boonmees departed relatives show up; his son, Boonsong, is some sort of primate beast (apparently caused by his having sex with a monkey spirit), which is admittedly hilarious, abetted by some dryly funny dialogue, and the deadpan work of the cast, who seem at their most alive in these, the films most welcoming moments. For the most part, though, the dialogue, despite being information-dense, seems to amount to little. The sparseness of the films chit-chat would suggest a certain economy and selectiveness, yet when the characters dare to speak, they say little of interest with regard to character, setting, or in fact much of anything. Furthermore, for long stretches, characters are introduced with little indication of who they are not that one expects to be spoonfed but the films overarching minimalism is ultimately its undoing in terms of narrative tightness and general interest. The film liberally jumps temporally also again, not that we need a ripple-effect every time it jumps back in time and irritatingly, there is often not any sort of cue that we haved moved backwards. At times, Uncle Boonmee is a film that feels like some sort of skewed satire on the sort of drivel people will digest as art, yet conversely, it features a scene of hilarious insanity, in which a woman has sex with a catfish. I dont really know why it happened or what it means, but it is one of the films most genuinely alluring moments, and above all else, it will keep you awake to the finish line. There are some occasional moments of resonance the fact that Boonmee cannot wait to be reuinted with his dead wife and there are a few interesting spiritual ideas at play, that ghosts are attached to people rather than constructs like Heaven and Hell. Sadly, these notions are as underdeveloped as anything else of interest in the film, and no further insights are given (it is more frustrating than an end-season Lost episode). A moribund late-day trek into a cave, meanwhile, makes the rest of the film seem positively enthralling, to the point that one almost wishes the film had suddenly transormed into a Descent-style slasher gorefest. Uncle Boonmee is nevertheless pleasing a lot of people; it wowed Cannes and was critically lauded upon theatrical release, but its head-scratchingly spare approach to everything concerned with conventional narrative techniques only serves to place the audience at an arm's length. Uncle Boonmee might be unlike anything we have ever seen before, but that is not to say that it is any good.
Quality:
Unsurprisingly, Uncle Boonmee isn't a tremendous way to show off your HD setup, with its relatively low-budget photography exhibiting plenty of grain. The scenery is pleasantly shot, though, and the day-time scenes make good use of this. Aurally, it's even more minimalist; incidental cues are almost non-existent and there's little here other than the dialogue and some light diegetic sound.
Extras:
Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul (16 minutes) - While the director certainly seems more vibrant and interesting than the project he has made, it's still difficult to get excited about what he is saying as a result. While he goes into great depth about how the film is a very personal one, that does little to help the audience. Short Film: "A Letter to Uncle Boonmee" (18 minutes) - This self-reflexive short begins promising, pointed as a meditation on the film form itself, but ultimately, like the film, it tapers off and winds up having very little of interest to say. Deleted Scenes (27 minutes) - A somewhat permissable set of omissions from the film given that they would only have made it longer, though one amazing scenic shot should certainly have been kept in. The segments culimate in a several-minute trawl through a cave, reaching the epitome of filmmaker indulgence, or close enough (he could have actually kept it in...). A final scene, in which those close to Boonmee go over his unfinished business, is effective in its banality, but that's it. A theatrical trailer is also included. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives was released on Blu-ray yesterday.