Uncle Boonmee is suffering from kidney failure. As an avid practitioner of Yoga, he is well aware of his body. He knows that he will die in 48 hours. He feels his illness must be related with his bad karma. He has killed too many communists, he says. Boonmee calls his distant relatives to take him back from hospital to die at home, a longan farm. There, they are greeted by the ghost of his deceased wife who has re-appeared to take care of him. His lost son also returns from the jungle in an ape-like form. The son has mated with a creature known as a ‘monkey ghost’ and has lived in the trees with her for the past 15 years. On the first night, Boonmee talks about his past lives that he remembers. On a second night, while the ghost wife is doing his kidney dialysis, Boonmee has a sudden urge to visit a place she has mentioned. So the group takes a journey into the jungle at night. It is full of animals and spirits. They finally reach a cave on top of the hill. Boonmee realizes that this is the cave in which he was born in the first life that he can remember. Then he passes away, taking with him tales that span hundreds of years.
There is plenty of humour in the film too, such as Jen's bemused first question to Boonsong on seeing he has morphed into a monkey: “Why did you grow your hair so long?” (he actually looks not unlike a jet-black Chewbacca, but he is often merely glimpsed as a black silhouette, red eyes glowing through the gloom). Not to mention the mini-fable within the main narrative, about a princess getting it on with a magical, talking catfish, which features a curious shot of the water-dweller getting frantically overexcited as it inserts itself up the royal passage. Honestly, it's the dirtiest female-creature relations committed to celluloid since Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul can not only claim to be the director with the most tongue-twisting name in the main competition at Cannes 2010, he also has the movie with the most unusual title and premise. Paul Martin is taken to a place where the human condition is given transcendentally fantastical treatment.
You can say what you like about the paucity of quality in this year's Cannes Official Selection – and as much as I have enjoyed every second of covering the world's most famous film festival, I have been surprised at how lacklustre some of the films scrapping it out for the Palme d'Or have been – but from the moment that the line-up was first announced, and the lamentations began for big name no-shows like The Tree of Life and The Rum Diary, I have been thoroughly looking forward to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, the latest movie from conceptual artist and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
This anticipation did not stem from a pre-existing affection for the Thai movie-maker's cinematic output; though he has an impeccable Cannes pedigree, having won the Un Certain Regard prize for Blissfully Yours in 2002 and the official competition jury prize in 2004 for Tropical Malady, I must confess to not possessing much in the way of prior familiarity with the Apichatpong Weerasethakul oeuvre. No, my eagerness came from a wonderfully original synopsis which indicated that Uncle Boonmee was the tale of a man coming to the end of his corporeal existence, and finding himself visited in his final hours by the ghost of his dead wife and an ape-mutated incarnation of his missing son. Put in conjunction with the head-spinning title, how can anyone not go a bundle and a half on a premise like that?
Of course, the winning name and story outline represent only the most minor of minor victories, as immaterial as a spectral spouse if the movie itself turns out to be cobblers. Happily then, in a Cannes strewn with disappointments, Apichatpong Weerasethakul delivers a film that is both charming and engrossing, albeit in serenely low-key manner.
The recipient of the prized Palme d'Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's hypnotic drama tells the haunting story of a Thai man suffering from kidney failure who retreats to the countryside to die in the company of his loved ones. As Uncle Boonmee nears the end of his life, the spirit of his late wife returns to guide him into the unknown, and his estranged son reappears in the form of a jungle spirit. Later, the ailing man leads his family on a journey to a hilltop cave where he first came into this world
One further interesting aspect of this calm, tranquil movie, attractively shot in the northern Thai mountains and forests, is that its blending of fantasy with universal human concerns is perhaps the closest thing I have seen from one of this year's Official Selection to the filmic output of Cannes 2010 head juror Tim Burton. Indeed Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives is not entirely dissimilar from Burton's own Big Fish (though the former is by far the superior picture), and this commonality could make it if not the dark horse for the Palme d'Or, then at least the dark monkey with red eyes.
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