Can I say I’ve seen three films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul or just one?
Weerasethakul (or Joe) is the Palme D’Or winning director from Thailand for his film “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” He’s one of a kind purely in the fact that he’s from Thailand. I’ll give you a dollar if you can name another.
But from reading reviews of his other films, most notably “Syndromes and a Century” and “Tropical Malady,” Joe has a penchant for the exotic landscape of his homeland, and he’s a pro at allowing his camera to patiently and quietly explore it.
Joe brought this love of his home to fruition in his “Uncle Boonmee” series, a collection of a feature film (“UBWCRHPL”), two short films and one magazine booklet of photographs.
I’ve now seen all four components, and although I had my reservations about his feature alone (I may have to see it again), as a collective whole, various themes of nature, poverty, humanity and reincarnation come to fruition.
I feel his artistic short, “Phantoms of Nabua,” speaks most elegantly. The film can be watched for free online, but unlike a normal film, this short is more of a living art exhibit made to be seen in a gallery. This I did at the British Film Institute Southbank Theater last summer.
Watching the film in there, the 11-minute cycle bombards and surrounds with a display of light and sound that surpasses that in even his feature. We watch an erratic lightning bolt strike repeatedly in the same vicinity until pulling back to realize this is a film projected on a cloth in the middle of a dark field. A group of teenage boys barely visible enter the screen, light a soccer ball on fire and begin kicking it around with the pulsating sound of a fireball soaring through the air. It’s an enchanting experience.
But in the end, they kick the ball into the projection, and the sheet slowly burns in a display of color and light (image above). The image itself disappears, but after the boys leave, the light from the lightning still flickers on.
The short is indicative of the destructive force of man to nature combated against nature’s persistence and ability to revive.
In his other short film, the 17-minute “A Letter to Uncle Boonmee,” Joe introduces his feature but follows up his starting location in Nabua. The film consists of little more than a letter being read aloud twice in a row by two different voices. The men speaking, both off screen as the camera stalks slowly around an empty house, are reading about a dream they had of a film about Uncle Boonmee and how they would make it.
Upon watching “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” this story reads to me as a reincarnation story. This vision exists in two times and places, but their similarities are striking. The final shot of the film is a long, slow pan from the treetops of the forest to a bull far off in the distance. This is the image that opens Joe’s feature, a simple profile of the same bull, but prefaced with a quote about reincarnation that makes the moment all the more effective.
It sounds weird, as does “Phantoms of Nabua” and so does “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” but even critics who were speculative of his feature agreed that as odd as the films sound, they never feel uncomfortable. The films, tough as they can be to watch with so little dialogue, are visually impressive and cast a sort of spell not often seen.
With that said, I can’t fully recommend “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” strictly by itself, but as part of this larger whole, it’s a remarkable and unique project.