After so many Golden Palm winners that blew my mind and enriched my personal knowledge of foreign cinema, here's a cinematic oddity that comes directly from Thailand and which I wish I could enjoy a little more than I did.
"Uncle Boonmee or the Man Who Could Recall his Past Lives" isn't for any taste and I wish I was able to have the very distinctive taste that can allow such a movie to be appreciated at fair value. Maybe I was in the wrong mood, maybe my mind was too demanding for something meaningful to happen that I failed to grasp the poetry of the film. But even that word 'poetry' loses its weight when it comes to movies, I take it as the kind of extra ingredient that can make a difference but not the recipe. For all his great intentions and now I have to copy-paste his name the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul took that word too much for granted and served us a film that can raise an interest on Thailand's spirituality, the underworld where ghosts and living creatures can coexist and interact, but there's a fine line between raising an interest and making something passably interesting.
Interesting the film is in fact, to the degree that you're able to plug your mind in a world that challenges the notion of time, space and human perceptions and totally forget that movies are meant to tell a specific story. Uncle Boonmee is no hero or protagonist, he's a man with renal failure, at the verge of death and who, during some trip in a remote farm, makes various encounters, including one of his deceased wife and another of his dead son who can be described as a man in a black monkey suit with red eyes pointing like Hal 9000. I accepted these unfamiliar visions and let myself transported by their uniqueness, wondering where they were going to lead us to.
I know expecting a meaning can be a foolish way to embrace such a film, but then again, if I feel myself incapable to insert any logic even in what seems to be a streak of beautiful vignettes, my mind might be wandering like some soul caught between life and death, and supposing this was the intended effect, I didn't feel any satisfied or at the very least emotionally gratified when the movie concluded, either it had something beautiful to convey and I failed to get it, either I was in such a hurry to be impressed that I saw the film without seeing it. That said, to my defense, the film doesn't have to offer the kind of dazzling imagery I could use to plead its cause, it's not "2001" or "The Tree of Life", movies with redeeming cinematic qualities for the puzzled minds.
There are so many long moments where we follow people exploring a cave, people watching TV, and even a monk taking a shower, that I was wondering what kind of artistic licenses can command a director to stretch time to the limit of boredom, here it is, the ugly world is out. I was bored... I was so bored that I even followed the advice of another IMDb user and rewatched the film by fast-forwarding it, even at 1.5 speed, the effect was all the same... the shell was still empty and I couldn't find any pearl. I get the symbolism or I guess I got it... I was puzzled and slightly fascinated by the interlude with the princess and her reflection, and the intercourse with the catfish, it seemed to suggest a sort of symbiosis between the human world and Mother Nature and that might be the closest thing to a common thread.
But then again, I can only speculate about the intentions of the narrator and the way he inserted the history of Thailand and the communist past allowed me to give him a benefit of the doubt and blame my failure to enjoy the film on a lack of interest in the initial subject. That's all I can say about "Uncle Boonmee", for such an imaginative and surely creative film, I'm afraid it didn't inspire me that much.... and the Wikipedia page doesn't even help.
"Uncle Boonmee or the Man Who Could Recall his Past Lives" isn't for any taste and I wish I was able to have the very distinctive taste that can allow such a movie to be appreciated at fair value. Maybe I was in the wrong mood, maybe my mind was too demanding for something meaningful to happen that I failed to grasp the poetry of the film. But even that word 'poetry' loses its weight when it comes to movies, I take it as the kind of extra ingredient that can make a difference but not the recipe. For all his great intentions and now I have to copy-paste his name the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul took that word too much for granted and served us a film that can raise an interest on Thailand's spirituality, the underworld where ghosts and living creatures can coexist and interact, but there's a fine line between raising an interest and making something passably interesting.
Interesting the film is in fact, to the degree that you're able to plug your mind in a world that challenges the notion of time, space and human perceptions and totally forget that movies are meant to tell a specific story. Uncle Boonmee is no hero or protagonist, he's a man with renal failure, at the verge of death and who, during some trip in a remote farm, makes various encounters, including one of his deceased wife and another of his dead son who can be described as a man in a black monkey suit with red eyes pointing like Hal 9000. I accepted these unfamiliar visions and let myself transported by their uniqueness, wondering where they were going to lead us to.
I know expecting a meaning can be a foolish way to embrace such a film, but then again, if I feel myself incapable to insert any logic even in what seems to be a streak of beautiful vignettes, my mind might be wandering like some soul caught between life and death, and supposing this was the intended effect, I didn't feel any satisfied or at the very least emotionally gratified when the movie concluded, either it had something beautiful to convey and I failed to get it, either I was in such a hurry to be impressed that I saw the film without seeing it. That said, to my defense, the film doesn't have to offer the kind of dazzling imagery I could use to plead its cause, it's not "2001" or "The Tree of Life", movies with redeeming cinematic qualities for the puzzled minds.
There are so many long moments where we follow people exploring a cave, people watching TV, and even a monk taking a shower, that I was wondering what kind of artistic licenses can command a director to stretch time to the limit of boredom, here it is, the ugly world is out. I was bored... I was so bored that I even followed the advice of another IMDb user and rewatched the film by fast-forwarding it, even at 1.5 speed, the effect was all the same... the shell was still empty and I couldn't find any pearl. I get the symbolism or I guess I got it... I was puzzled and slightly fascinated by the interlude with the princess and her reflection, and the intercourse with the catfish, it seemed to suggest a sort of symbiosis between the human world and Mother Nature and that might be the closest thing to a common thread.
But then again, I can only speculate about the intentions of the narrator and the way he inserted the history of Thailand and the communist past allowed me to give him a benefit of the doubt and blame my failure to enjoy the film on a lack of interest in the initial subject. That's all I can say about "Uncle Boonmee", for such an imaginative and surely creative film, I'm afraid it didn't inspire me that much.... and the Wikipedia page doesn't even help.