Uncle Boonmee who recalls me to my present life | Scanners

"Uncle Boonmee" starts with a black bovid tied to a tree at night (or deep-blue day-for-night). I was in love with the film before the end of this almost-wordless (but for the call, "Keow!") opening. The close ups and vocalizations of the animal are enchanting enough, but by the time s-he pulls free and runs across a field of tall grass toward the jungle, I was in heaven. Why? Well, because of the beauty of the movement (something in the way s-he moves...) and the nightsounds and the color and the composition. Later a character who should know says that "Heaven is overrated." Watching and listening to this movie -- for all its bugs and pests and sorrows and ailments, accompanied by unimagined wonders -- you tend to believe her. (She indirectly confirms David Byrne's assessment that it is a place where nothing ever happens. Here, by the edge of the jungle, everything is always happening.)

There are visual and aural effects in Apichatpong's movies -- some of them are natural landscapes, but also actual post-production work -- that (as I said after I first visited Pandora) make the vaunted blue-cheese world of "Avatar" look like a kitschy fiber-optic lamp in a strip-mall Thai restaurant. This is especially funny because Joe frequently evokes that whimsically plastic aspect of Thai popular culture in his films: the flashy temple lights and karaoke restaurant in "Uncle Boonmee," or the cave shrine that plays a Christmas carol in "Tropical Malady." The most awesome images in Joe's films are so deceptively simple they seem utterly natural: a tree alight with fireflies, the ghost of an animal rising from its body and entering the jungle, the confrontation between a man and a tiger, a solar eclipse, a piece of ductwork that inhales fog, red-eyed humanoids in the dense foliage, star-fields on the interior walls of a cave...

Ghosts appear, in one form or another, throughout these films -- quite strikingly during one memorable evening in "Uncle Boonmee" -- but they seem more an extension of the known world than an intrusion of the supernatural, as in some Western and Far Eastern ghost stories. Joe has expressed his affection for traditional Thai horror movies, and although I've never seen one, I wonder if they're more about the frisson than the "Boo!" (He says they are usually funny, also.)

But back to the "interpretation" stuff: Uncle Boonmee does not recall his past lives for us. The film itself does, but not by announcing "flashbacks." The lives simply appear, as in the opening, or a scene by a waterfall (think of those framed and lighted waterfall motion scenes) with a princess and a catfish. We aren't led into these recollections, if that's what they are (and, by the way, would Uncle Boonmee be the cow or the man, the catfish or the princess?); they are just part of the tapestry of the film, as are ghost-memories of certain Boonmee relatives. When Joe speaks in interviews (and the commentary track for "Tropical Malady") of his diaristic desire to make movies that chronicle his personal memories, his use of the word "memories" seems to include fantasy and imagination and dreams -- which are also the stuff memories are made of. (In an essay called "Ghosts in the Darkness," he quotes Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the subject of art that grows from "our desire to remember": "The memory is clear but there is no possibility that it is true." That's a resonant summation of the Apichatpong sensibility.)

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmrJuRo7umvtJorKebnJp6o7vOp6SenV2stbB50Z6amqScqHqusYytpmalqWK9s7HSnqWtZZyes6Y%3D