Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010’s winner of the Palme D’Or at the Cannes film festival beat out the likes of Mike Leigh, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Abbas Kiarostami. His name is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a director from Thailand who has been making his rounds at Cannes for some time with his distinct visual style.

In “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” he uses the backdrop of the rich, exotic Thai jungle to tell an odd but not disconcerting ghost story. Right there in his title, Weerasethakul (also known as Joe in the film critic community) explains to his audience the significance of the ideas of reincarnation in Thailand.

So his film is not complicated, but it is no less demanding.

Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is an old man dying of kidney failure, and in his home immersed in the forest, two ghosts begin to present themselves to him, his sister-in-law and his two assistants. They show him his past and communicate to him his future in the afterlife.

This leads to some moments that are striking, to say the least, including the most bizarre love scene you’ll see with a catfish this side of Rule 34, an encounter with a red-eyed monkey man and a deep excursion into a space-like cavern.

However, “Uncle Boonmee” makes you work to get to these moments. Most directors speak with their camera rather than their words. Joe speaks with an absence of anything, allowing his camera to linger for agonizingly long times and almost always at a distance from his characters.

The time in which he simply makes us wait and watch as his camera sits motionless upon people at a dinner table or sitting in a room watching TV or watching a bull struggle to free itself from a tree is a taxing experience. When something does happen, it comes as a surprise certainly, and the feeling of “pure cinema” comes to mind.

But as we wait patiently and diligently for the film to announce itself, to speak loudly amidst the silence, it never does. In the first three quarters of the movie, there is perhaps not a single close up on anything or anyone. Joe instead shows us the colorful and alive forest in the background, seemingly to make up for the characters that seem without life.

2 ½ stars