Mystical Thai film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was this year’s surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This is what critics have said about it.
TIME OUTMany sequences have a brooding lyrical beauty, the film’s rhythms are at once elastic and mesmerizing, and the narrative features disconcerting shifts that may mystify viewers unfamiliar with his earlier work.
But at the same time one does perhaps wonder why so many admirers of Joe’s work are quite so unbridled in their enthusiasm.
I myself see no reason to be any more indulgent towards a Buddhist belief in reincarnation than I am towards similar Western superstitions, so my interest in monkey ghosts and talking catfish is constrained by my feelings that such characters are simply implausible, especially when the former - black hairy things with gleaming red eyes - look as if they’ve strayed in from a Star Wars picture.
HOLLYWOOD REPORTERThis view of reincarnation as all beings coexisting in one non-linear universal consciousness is also central to Apichatpong’s conception of cinema as the medium with the power to replay past lives and connect the human world to animal or spiritual ones.
That may be why he shot the last scenes involving parallel worlds in 16mm, as homage to the format of film in his childhood memory.
His casting of actors or roles (like a monk, a Burmese worker) from previous films is also a kind of reincarnation of the director’s cinematic past lives.
SCREENThe film is a beautifully assembled affair, with certain scenes staged with painterly composure, and also increasingly moving as the subtle story develops.
Plus Apichatpong Weerasethakul is not afraid of adding in moments of surreal humour - often laugh-out-loud moments for that - which helps the pacing of the film.
Most memorable, though, are the animal ghosts - one of whom is Boonmee’s long lost son - who emerge from the forest. In a charming reference to old-fashioned horror movies, these ghosts are simply actors in cheap gorilla suits, replete with blazing red eyes to distract from the amusingly ordinariness of their costumes.
Again this is Weerasethakul having some fun, and offering his audience the chance to laugh out loud.
TELEGRAPHIt’s barely a film; more a floating world. To watch it is to feel many things - balmed, seduced, amused, mystified.
It’s to feel that one is encountering a distinctive metaphysics far removed from that on display in most contemporary cinema.
Weerasethakul has not only drawn on the themes, landscapes and mood-states he tapped into Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady and Syndromes And A Century, films that extended the imaginative and emotional grammar of arthouse cinema over the last decade; he has refined them to create his most accessible and most enchanted film to date.
VARIETYAnimism, apparitions, out-of-body experiences, sex with a catfish - there’s all that and more in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wonderfully nutty Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
More readily accessible than his previous films in its dreamlike vignette structure, yet even more resistant to concrete interpretation, this latest deadpan enigma is unlikely to significantly broaden the singular Thai filmmaker’s commercial following.
But critics, cinephiles and programmers will be enraptured, as will viewers adventurous enough to surrender to the film’s Buddhist rhythms, mythical underpinnings and mesmeric images, ensuring a narrow but rich future life for Uncle Boonmee.
VarietyThis article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
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