It’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 in 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.
Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is dying of kidney failure and has retired to the countryside in North-East Thailand to see out his days in the company of his loved ones. When he’s not receiving medical attention, he tends to his bees and gazes out at the lush nature that surrounds him.
One evening, as he’s dining with his family, his wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), who died fourteen years before, appears at the table. So does, a strange-looking simian whose eyes resemble red lasers: he is, albeit in the form of a Monkey Ghost, Boonmee’s long-lost son. And so begins a conversation, laden with joy and sadness, drifting into the night, in which a man on the verge of dying questions his wife on what he might find in the afterworld – and, if he will find her there too.
Later, he will travel with his family through jungles and deep into a hilltop cave that he likens to a womb, and whose darkness is suddenly and spectacularly interrupted by walls that effulge rather like Roger Hiorns’s Seizure installation in a deserted South London council flat.
But this is a film that is only partly about journeys. The story that it tells isn’t dramatic, just as the world it evokes isn’t new; here, reincarnation, to say nothing of the division between humans and animals, is widely accepted. At points, it’s implied – an important word, for Weerasethakul is too sensitive and generous an artist to insist on single interpretations – that Boonmee may, in a previous life, have been a buffalo, or perhaps a catfish that in one of the film’s most bizarre and delicately handled scenes has sex with a disfigured princess by a sylvan waterfall.
There are many elements of this film that remain elusive and secretive. But that’s a large part of its appeal: Weerasethakul, without ever trading in stock images of Oriental inscrutability, successfully conveys the subtle but important other-worldliness of this part of Thailand. He doesn’t have to take recourse in fantasy; there are frequent allusions to battles fought against Communism in the region, as well as the arrival there of many migrants from Laos and Cambodia.
In this respect, given the bloody battles in Bangkok over the last few weeks, it’s tempting to see the red-eyed Monkey Ghost as a distant antecedent of the (class- rather than rural-conscious) Red Shirt protestors (many of whom come from the North East of the country).
Those Monkey Ghosts are described as “past people”, but they’re past people in the same way as ghosts: they still have the power to attach themselves to the present, to make an impact. In spite of constantly being tracked and chased by hunters, they grow in number towards the end of the film: they are part rumour, part multitude, utopian possibility. They symbolize – just as the Red Shirt protestors fight to keep aflame - an alternative vision of the present and of the future in that anxious nation.
Mostly though, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a film about what it means to take care of others, and of the importance of caring and of being cared for. And it’s a film, in its meticulous attention to sound design, its exquisite cinematography, and the patience with which it unfolds, morphs and insinuates itself in our imaginations, that, I hope upon hope, the selection committee of the Palme d’Or will care for as much as I do.
