NYFF 2010: Some brief notes toward constructing a user's manual for "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"

1) A couple of night before the New York Film Festival press screening of this picture, I was trying to prep a friend who would also be attending, and whose first Apichatong Weerasethakul this was to be. Bearing my impressions of Weerasethakul's great, but resistant-to-standard-film-critical-thought-and-vocabulary prior feature Syndromes and a Century in mind, I advised her: "Okay, so dip into a little early to middle-period John Ashbery. Then subtract the self-conscious intellectualism. Then add Thailand. Then drop the resting heart rate. Then, think film.Then subtract linearity, again." After the screening, my friend told me that, despite this picture being more linear than expected, my prep work had in fact been useful, and that the film was even greater than that!

2) Another useful antecedent to cite relative to what this picture's about is Tarkovsky's The Mirror. Only because this is Weerasethakul, the quietude of its forest scenes, which correspond in their poetry to the dacha scenes in Mirror, is more gentle and also eerie in a different way. The world-historical is broached in a more indirect way than in Tarkovsky's film; here the dying title character wonders aloud about his karma being affected by all the "Communists [he's] killed." But that weight does continue to bear, ever so subtly, on Uncle Boonmee's vision, coming to a peculiar fruition near the end.

3) The aforementioned gentleness, the matter-of-fact depiction of ghosts, the near-anesthetizing sound design of the first forty-five minutes or so, really do cast a spell that may zonk an unsuspecting viewer. This is a film about which it will likely be quite frequently said, "Things really perk up around the time the talking catfish shows." Which is true. But don't let that fool you: it's not really all about the talking catfish.

4) What's the point at which the you-know-what-word-that-starts-with-an-"m" started popping into my head? Possibly when the transition to clunky handheld camerawork went down, during the compelled-cave-exploration scene. The mixing of myth, mysticism, and a very direct confrontation of mortality came together in a visually breathtaking, intellectually provocative, altogether head-spinning sequence that hardly announced itself as such; indeed, the entirety of the genius of this film sort of sneaks up on you, which is, again, typical of Weerasthakul's modesty and gentleness.

5) Yes, the monkey-man suit is below 2001: A Space Odyssey par. I believe that's deliberate.

5) So, yes, I think this likely absolutely deserved to win the Palme d'or at Cannes, and much as I don't necessarily like to do this, I shall have to recall that this decision was pooh-poohed in the Toronto Star by Peter Howell, who said "as a cinema experience, Uncle Boonmee is about as gripping as watching a variety store security video." Howell is entitled to his opinion, except it's wrong, and the whole tenor of this piece is kind of, well, horrifying in its reactionary patronizing; it's saying, well, this "art cinema" thing is all well and good, but if you start giving awards to it you'll set a bad precedent, so you ought to get with the program and honor stuff that's normal. Howell's a nice guy, but there comes a point where being a nice guy doesn't do much to absolve your sins. Such anti-intellectual, anti-art bilge isn't covered under the "nice guy" provision, I'm afraid. (UPDATE: A commenter points out that Howell just this very moment, more or less, did an about-face on the picture, and the fact that it won the Palme d'or, without even mentioning his Cannes notice; see here.)

6) I hope it's not a spoiler to say this: How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?

Comments

[michaelgsmith]

I am now even more excited to see this movie than before. Thankfully, it's playing the Chicago International Film Festival next month.

[bstrong]

That catfish was pretty neat.

[Tom Russell]

We'll have to give SYNDROMES another try (it was also highly-recommended by C. Mason Wells), as me and the missus didn't quite click with it. It might be that it loses something on a small television, though.

[Scott Nye]

One of the many, many reasons I wish I could reasonably attend the New York Film Festival. SYNDROMES alternately gave me cinema ecstasy and nearly put me to sleep, which is reason enough to see anything Weerasethakul will ever do from here on out.

[Mark Slutsky]

Yes, yes, yes, to all of this, especially the Howell diss; that piece was appalling and totally uncalled-for (and quoted approvingly not a few times by a certain film blogger you love to hate).

Apichatpong gave a great talk at TIFF where he showed his short "Anthem" and clips from all of his features. I hate this word when it's just used to refer to something weird or uncanny, but I'm convinced he's a Surrealist in the original sense of the term.

[Keith Uhlich]

I hope our souls can go out for karaoke some night, Glenn. Hell, I hope all our souls can go out for karaoke some night.

[Lance McCallion]

Seeing this Sunday night at NYFF! Excellent write-up Glenn, and points well made. A lot of what you wrote here could just as easily be applied to Tropical Malady as well, which I'd urge people to check out. Especially in prepping for Boonmee, as I think the two will likely prove to share more similarities with each other than Boonmee will to Syndromes.

I'd also suggest checking out Joe's short A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, which is stunning, as a sort of prologue/companion/parallel to the feature.

[warren oates]

I farking love Joe's films. He's my number one personal world cinema discovery of the last few years. I caught up with all of his previous work last year and was elated with the Cannes victory this spring. Thanks for writing about UNCLE BOONMEE, Glenn. Exactly right to highlight the filmmaker's modesty and gentleness. Unlike many a tortured (and sometimes collaborator torturing) meditative cinema auteur, Joe practices what he preaches. To an unusual extent, the films are calm because he is. A regular meditator, he makes it a practice to sit even longer while he's writing screenplays.

[Embarrassed Anon]

Interestingly enough Peter Howell went on to write this: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/article/864047--uncle-boonmee-a-ghostly-monkey-a-sexy-fish-and-a-world-of-wonder

[Oliver_C]

Now I can't stop thinking of similar glowing-eyed silhouettes in 'The Fog' and 'The Terminator'.

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Embarrassed Anon: I hadn't been aware of Howell's sort-of about-face (which, now that I look at its dateline, could very well be because it didn't exist when I posted my own piece!), which doesn't even REFERENCE his prior hissy fit. How very odd! It's like Jack Kroll revising his opinion of "Bonnie and Clyde" without mentioning that he had dissed it in the first place. Unusual.

[Griff]

@ Glenn: The famed NEWSWEEK critical reconsideration on BONNIE AND CLYDE was by Joseph Morgenstern.

[bill]

I've only seen TROPICAL MALADY, but I loved it. And that image at the top has me ever so curious.

[S. Porath]

@Griff: Morgenstern didn't deny his earlier pan.

[Eric]

Thanks for the primer. I have recently been trying to fill this gap in my viewing history. I don't mean to compare myself to Jonathan Rosenbaum, but I believe I had a similar experience when watching MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON in that I lacked "an analytical context in which to place it" and found it difficult to retain a lot of what I was watching and probably watched the whole move 3 times before finishing it once. I know he was educated in Chicago, but it's interesting that so much of the background you suggest is Western (obviously, except for the "Then add Thailand part"). Thanks again!

[darryl]

pardon my ignorance, but what word is 'you-know-what-word-that-starts-with-an-"m" ?

[Jason M.]

I think it's masterpiece, Darryl. Who knows, though. Maybe it's monkey.

[bill]

I actually thought it might be "mystical", or some form of it, which Glenn goes on to use very soon thereafter. But I like that "monkey" idea. It's got legs.

[Chris O.]

Or it just might be "mumblecore" since he talks about "clunky handheld camerawork."

[Kevyn Knox]

Granted, I was not so enthralled with Syndromes (as pretty much everyone else seemed to be) but Tropical Malady and now Uncle Boonmee, make for a strong idea of Apichatpong's magical/mystical style of storytelling.

Just the fact that suddenly a talking catfish (who does do more than just "talk") enters the story and no one really thinks it out of the ordinary, speaks volumes for Apichatpong's natural sense of the mythical in his filmmaking. Von Trier had a ravenous fox spew forth "chaos reigns" but in his case, it was meant to antagonize (as Von Trier usually means to do), here with Apichat...er, Joe, it is simply a reasonable part of the movie - a reasonable part of the filmmaker's mythmaking. And anyway, the talking catfish isn't even the strangest thing in the film - if you even call it strange (which I suppose I do not really). It just lends to the unnatural natural beauty of his films.

[Glenn Kenny]

By the way, yes, the word I had in mind was/is "masterpiece."

Kevin's point's well taken. It's part of the mood of the film, that slightly-zonked feel that you get, that makes you say, "Oh, yeah, sure...talking catfish, and why not?"

[Volvagia]

Um...no. Mumblecore also insinuates being a filmmaker with no taste for the surreal or exaggerated. Mad Men is closer to Mumblecore than Uncle Boonmee is.

[Paul Johnson]

That Howell piece is pretty bad (are we supposed to be dismayed that it's not a 'typical' Thai film? Whereas I suppose Viridiana was a typical Spanish movie, and Taxi Driver was a typical American movie.), but it doesn't anger me nearly as much as the dismissal by the Corlisses that appeared in Time. The crude insults thrown at Joe's films ('His work has been caviar to high-minded critics but dog food to international audiences.') would've been aggravating in themselves, but what especially irked me was how when tasked to name other films by Apichatpong, the authors cited his three most difficult to see films - Ghosts of Asia, Phantoms of Nubua and The Adventures of Iron Pussy. They thus conveyed the notion that Apichatpong was a hopelessly esoteric choice (why, none of these movies are even available from Netflix), championed only by the condescending cognoscenti. With several Apichatpong films readily available from Netflix, the intentional misdirection just looked like an asshole move, a way to maintain a neat, deceptive division between those who supposedly know what's what and who's who (Time magazine) and those who supposedly don't (Time's readers).

[Kurt Walker]

Fun fact: Apichatpong has gone on record to say that he does not personally connect with Tarkovsky's Mirror, but really admires it!

[Zach]

I'll have to resist going into some sloppy, gooey paean to Joe's movies here. I'll just say he's one of the very best and most vital working artists in the world today, and I can't wait to see this film.

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