Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 123movies

Movie Review | 'Uncle Boonmee Who Tin Call back His By Lives'

A Good day to This Life, and All Its Ghosts

Credit... Strand Releasing

Uncle Boonmee Who Tin Remember His Past Lives

NYT Critic's Selection

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Drama, Fantasy

Not Rated

1h 54m

• March i, 2011

Last May, when a Cannes Film Festival jury headed by Tim Burton awarded the Palme d'Or to "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," there was widespread surprise and a few eruptions of outrage. The picture — from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has become a familiar presence on the festival circuit over the past decade — is unquestionably strange, at times mystifyingly oblique. Those who insist on a linear narrative or an easily identifiable gear up of themes may find themselves puzzled, perhaps to the signal of frustration. But it is difficult to run across how this movie, with its contemplative mood and genial, curious spirit, could make anybody aroused. On the contrary: encountered in an accordingly exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss.

"Uncle Boonmee" is non a hard moving-picture show. Like its title character, a farmer and beekeeper whose home in a peaceful mountain valley is occasionally visited past ghosts and mythical creatures, the motion picture is friendly and patient, welcoming you into its odd and beautiful world without much fuss or anniversary. You may demand a bit of time to accommodate your eyes and expectations — the nighttime wood scenes, like those in Mr. Weerasethakul's "Tropical Malady," are shot in dim, shadowy lite, and what story at that place is emerges slowly and in fragments — but after a while, like one of those ghosts, yous volition start to experience at home.

Boonmee is suffering from kidney illness, and as he goes briskly almost his everyday business organisation, accompanied by his sister-in-constabulary, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), and the immature men he has hired as caretakers, it becomes clear that he is maxim goodbye. His nowadays life is shadowed by regrets, just some of which are alluded to, like his actions during a long-ago menses of political violence. Ane evening, as he and Jen are having dinner outdoors, they are joined by the specters of Boonmee's long-lost son (Geerasak Kulhong), who has causeless the shape of a human-size monkey, and of Boonmee'southward wife (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), whose appearance is more traditionally movie-ghostlike.

The living and the dead antipodal calmly and matter-of-factly, as if nothing particularly unusual were going on, and this undramatic blending of the bizarre and the banal is 1 of Mr. Weerasethakul's signatures. Though he is heir to a long tradition of cinematic surrealism, he does not traffic in daze or discomfort, or seek to upend the tyranny of conventional logic. Rather, he uses the illusion-making powers of the medium to suggest, politely if also mischievously, an alternative way of seeing things.

Among those things are shadowy beasts with glowing red eyes and an dotty catfish that, in a dreamlike fairy tale within the pic, seduces an unhappy princess. This scene, which may have had special appeal to Mr. Burton (whose oeuvre includes the fantastical "Large Fish"), is charming and a bit startling, and it provides a key to Uncle Boonmee's cosmos.

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A scene from "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His By Lives," the winner of the M Jury prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

For him, and for the moving-picture show that borrows his name, there is no real boundary betwixt past and present, dream and reality, body and spirit. The world of nature, properly understood — and looked at from the proper angle — contains all of those disparate elements and affords them roughly equal value. Boonmee, a believer in karma, inhabits a world in which a Buddhist understanding of the transitory nature of various forms of being coexists with animist behavior in the supernatural power of detail places, objects and living things.

This vision of existence is, to modern Western eyes, both peculiar and fallacious. That it is embedded in an exploration of the natural beauty of northern Thailand is certainly a bonus. A trip that Boonmee and his friends take to a cave deep in the wood would make a captivating nature documentary in its ain right, and the characters' serene credence of their amazing surroundings simply deepens the sense of sublimity.

But Mr. Weerasethakul is less concerned with exhibiting the exotic glories of his native land — which, afterwards all, is non exotic to him — than with drawing out the latent mysteries of ordinary existence. He is as at dwelling house in (which is to say every bit estranged from and curious virtually) the shadows of the countryside and the fluorescence of modern metropolis life. The jungle fantasia of "Tropical Malady" was followed by the disjointed quasicomedy of "Syndromes and a Century," which turned an urban corporate mural of role work and consumption into something like scientific discipline fiction.

And in "Uncle Boonmee" the lushness of Boonmee'due south farm gives way to a drab hotel and a garish funeral hall. Instead of ghosts in the darkness, there are flickering apparitions on a television screen. And instead of nostalgia for vanished magic, there is the recognition that magic — like the memories of the dead, and therefore the dead themselves — is always present if we know where and how to look. Mr. Weerasethakul certainly knows where to look and is generous plenty to share some of what he sees.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN Call up HIS PAST LIVES

Opens on Midweek in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul; directors of photography, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Yukontorn Mingmongkon and Charin Pengpanich; edited past Lee Chatametikool; product pattern by Akekarat Homlaor; produced by Simon Field, Keith Griffiths, Charles de Meaux and Mr. Weerasethakul; released by Strand Releasing. At Movie Forum, 209 West Houston Street, due west of Avenue of the Americas, Southward Village. In Thai, with English subtitles. Running time: one hour 53 minutes. This film is non rated.

WITH: Thanapat Saisaymar (Boonmee), Jenjira Pongpas (Jen), Sakda Kaewbuadee (Tong), Natthakarn Aphaiwonk (Huay), Geerasak Kulhong (Boonsong), Kanokporn Thongaram (Roong), Samud Kugasang (Jaai), Wallapa Mongkolprasert (Princess), Sumit Suebsee (Soldier) and Vien Pimdee (Farmer).

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/movies/02uncle.html

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