Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand, born 1970)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Uncle Boonmee is dying. He looks to be in his fifties- too young to die- and reasonably healthy, but he is dying nonetheless. He lives in a secluded part of the Thai forest with his sister-in-law and nephew. They trade mundane conversation. There is no plot to speak of.

One night, Boonmee’s deceased wife appears from thin air while the family sit at the dinner table. They barely react. They greet her like you would greet a casual acquaintance that you hadn’t seen for a while. Boonmee’s son, who had previously disappeared, turns up too, and now he is a monkey. He sits at the table with them and begins talking, gravely and solemnly, apparently still somewhat human. Again, they barely react. We don’t see him again for the rest of the movie.

What does it all mean?

God knows.

The film completely breaks off from this narrative line to present us with a vignette where a woman is complimented by a talking fish and goes on to have a sexual encounter with it. Then we re-join Boonmee and his family for a long sequence featuring very little dialogue where, with no preamble or explanation, they wade through the forest and go into a cave. Then we have a montage sequence- I quite liked this, actually; it was evocative, a little irreverent, and reminded me somewhat of Tabu. Then, after Boonmee is dead- we see neither the death itself, the immediate aftermath, nor the funeral- we have an utterly baffling sequence in a hotel room and then the movie ends.

These descriptions might make the film sound luminous and phantasmagorical. There are some critics who found it exactly that. But for me, such a reading runs counter to the many scenes of people just sitting around a house making pointless, ephemeral, often extremely stilted conversation. To my eyes, the movie was disjointed, incoherent, and often very, very boring. I’ve never seen a film that is both hallucinatory and pedestrian.

Of course, this is my very first Thai movie, so there may be aspects of this film and their culture in general (there is a single, passing reference to Communism and conflict) which are completely lost in translation to a westerner like me. But of all the films I have reviewed so far, this is the one I liked the least. I didn’t understand the film and I didn’t like it. The acting was wooden and the cinematography was downright ugly.

Looking at other media sources that have covered this film, including interviews with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it seems that these issues, amongst other things, were deliberate stylistic choices that reference cheap television shows and retro cinema. So perhaps there is something about this film I am just not seeing. Perhaps I am not used to a filmmaker who has had the freedom and inclination to be so flagrant with their idiosyncrasies, whose outré inflections might have been more digestible in a novel or on an album, where you can skip certain tracks. Perhaps I will be more attuned to Weeransethakul’s sensibilities when I tackle the other two films of his that are on the list. But as things stand, I just didn’t get this one at all. I wasn’t on its wavelength and it wasn’t on mine.

Tropical Malady (2004) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Of all the films I’ve reviewed so far, Tropical Malady is the one with which I can draw the most comparisons with others. This may run against the critical consensus that Weerasethakul is one of the most incomparable filmmakers currently active- incidentally, not something I would otherwise refute- but it nonetheless stands that I can compare Tropical Malady to more movies than any other. For one thing, it has a split structure, bisected completely down the middle into two overtly distinct sections; this in itself affords it parallels with Melancholia and Tabu, particularly the latter. The same characters from the first half are completely recontextualised in the second- this opens it up to comparisons with Certified Copy, Mulholland Drive, and, to a lesser extent, Under the Skin. Its pivotal motif is an illuminated tree- it can thus be compared to The Tree of Life, especially since it also explores a human’s place as part of primal nature, and shares that film’s arcane, cryptic aesthetic, arguably exceeding it. It can be compared to Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring in that it offsets meditative qualities in remote settings with undercurrents of violence. Finally, it can be compared to The Assassin, in that Weerasethakul insists, in the movie’s second hour, that all of the action grinds to an absolute halt and that the viewer is obliged to abandon all notions of entertainment or typical narrative structure and spend an entire hour in the Thai forest with no dialogue and a very heavy preponderance of gently rustling leaves.

Experimentation is fine, but did this sequence really need to be an hour long? Would twenty minutes not have sufficed? We’re entering perilous territory here, whereby I am effectively telling the artist how he ‘should’ have made the film, though I am attempting to broach the issue from an inquisitive angle rather than a didactic one. I’m aware that I’m not in any position to make such suggestions, especially when you consider that I didn’t really understand the movie. If I was to say anything praiseworthy about Tropical Malady, it would be that I did not find it quite as confounding as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and that I did, on the whole, like it more. This does not change, though, the fact that so far, my principal, overarching reaction to Weerasethakul films is unmitigated puzzlement, followed very, very closely by abject boredom. For one thing, I feel alienated from the material; I just don’t feel like it speaks to me in any way. The film’s first hour, with its relatively conventional structure, was mostly okay, but I was still struck by the mundanity of the director’s dialogue and perplexed as to why he left these banal exchanges in the movie or what, if anything, they are supposed to achieve or signify.

Anyway, the movie’s second hour can be interpreted in any number of ways. On a most basic level, it could have been a dream. Or it can be seen as an abstract visual representation of the relationship between our central characters Keng and Tong, and the ‘danger’ it potentially signifies for the more reluctant Keng, whose family and friends may not be so accepting of the relationship as the other man’s. Another possibility is that, as Tong walks away at the end of our more standard narrative, Keng, for whatever reason, never sees him again and the ‘ghost’ of his memory follows Keng around for an unspecified period of time while he subsequently feels ‘exiled’ and completely isolated from the world around him. When someone extremely important to you walks out of your life forever, and there’s nothing you can do about it, even if you haven’t parted on poor terms, then sometimes the hole that they have left can take on complex and unforeseen shapes. Sometimes they might feel close enough to touch, as when Keng wakes to find himself face to face with the animal that Tong has become. Sometimes, maybe, they are naked. And sometimes you are quite literally chasing their memory, trying to catch it, desperate to pin it down.

These ruminations may give off the sense that Tropical Malady, through perceived depth, is an inherently ‘interesting’ film, maybe even fascinating, and if that’s the case, then by all means watch it. But to me, this would raise a query as to whether a film can be both interesting and boring at the same time- if it can, then Tropical Malady unquestionably achieves that feat. Not many films can say that.

Syndromes and a Century (2006) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Nothing happens in Syndromes and a Century. It’s made up of a series of conversations centred around a hospital. Some of these conversations are between doctors and patients. Weerasethakul throws in some notable filmic features- a technically excellent tracking shot here, a long, languid, unbroken take there, but nothing happens.

I had to ask myself whether this was preferable to the dynamics of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, where things do happen, but they involve human monkeys and sex fish and are thoroughly bizarre. I concluded that it was. Syndromes and a Century is a calm, hushed film redolent of the meditative quality you might get from watching clouds slowly move past, or glaciers. It’s very quiet, and despite the problems that it had with the Thai censors, it’s very inoffensive.

As usual, I don’t really know what any of it means, and suffice to say, I’m still having some trouble grasping the nature of Weerasethakul’s vision. But the passage of time seems to be a major theme. Sometimes you can physically feel the passage of time when you are watching it, as Weerasethakul offers us some extremely torpid views of scenery, statues, trees, and exterior views of the hospital. Some of this insistence on deathly pacing even called to mind the extremities of The Assassin, whilst fully removed from the austere dread that comes with Béla Tarr’s merciless visions of desolation.  

If I was going to speculate, I’d proffer that this film is supposed to strike notes that are somewhere in the range of The Tree of Life and Yi Yi: A One and a Two. It’s far more understated than either of those films- it contains nothing in the way of bombast, not even a little- but I think it wants to show us how the meaning of our existence is locked within the seams of our daily lives, just as precious metals are locked within the seams of rocks. I didn’t find it particularly profound, but I did find it touching in a delicate, wispy, threadbare sort of way, like something semi-meaningful someone once said to you that you only half-heard, or a minimalist piece of music heavy on ambience and repetition- ‘Wealth’ by Talk Talk, for example, or ‘Rutti’ by Slowdive.

For the third time now with this director, my abiding impression is that there’s something I’m missing, and that I don’t really ‘get it’. The ride, however, was smoother this time than with the previous two, and I’m left feeling as if I’ve woken up from a befuddling but not altogether unpleasant dream, one which made me feel like I was somewhere else, and maybe even someone else, for a little while.