Week 6: Uncle Boonmee
Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2010
114min
The Study, Teviot 7:30pm
Tuesday, 25th October
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film is a meditation on death, rebirth, and memory. Boonmee is ill, and as his life approaches its end he begins simultaneous journeys among the people and events in his life, as well as through the spectral terrain of his past lives. Ghosts take up residence in the family home; dinner is interrupted by humans transformed into animal spirits; a princess has a brief affair with a catfish in a moonlit pond fed by coruscating waterfalls. All this as the family prepares to send one of its own off into this spirit world which surrounds them all.
Each remaining moment is precious and Boonmee is determined to savour each one. Accordingly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul cannot allow the film to race giddily from one apparition to the next. Each event, each visitation, each memory is one of a very finite number left in this man’s life, and the audience is made to feel the beauty and fragility of each second. By contemplating the minutiae of Boonmee’s last days, the film shows us the objects and events of our world, and the processes of our own memories, in a new light.
Each scene of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a quiet, sublimely beautiful celebration of this life, and a growing acceptance of, and comfort with, the mysteries which surround us, and which wait for us in the end.
Written by Mr Phil