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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) (2010) - Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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Watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Spoilers below.

Baffling. Comforting to an extent I can't recall experiencing elsewhere in a movie. The long, stationary shots let the reality of Weerasethakul's strange world utterly seep into one's mind, so that even as red glowing eyes appear in the darkness of the farmhouse, there is no sense of imminent endangerment or fear. The world is as it is, changing as a necessary part of being, but calm in its presence.

The only sense of fear that does occur is the fear of political violence, occasionally glimpsed against the backdrop of the struggle towards acceptance. State violence is so conceptually disruptive to the personal and spiritual environment of the movie that it can only cast a shadow over the substance without obliterating it; we get a glimpse of this obliteration with the Monkey Ghosts in chains being led by soldiers, their eyes no longer glowing red as they have been reduced from a society to a species.

As Tong brings the flashlight into the cave the group enters, it illuminates various parts of the strange, shadowy structure. Even at the very beginning of the sequence, the geometry of the opening, surrounded totally by darkness, is dramatically shifted when the artificial light enters and brings the stone into a liminal state in between its nighttime darkness and the natural light of day, illuminating geometry but not altering the environment to that of the true day. This effect is even more apparent in the glittering room of the cave, where the flashlight moving in and out shifts the setting from a sea of too-near stars to simply reflective rocks and back again, as the light shone on the world to navigate it alters its substance and its meaning. This is perhaps the same light that Boonmee dreams about before his death, the light of the unified perspective of the authoritarian state he imagines particularizing the past and obliterating the self. To better understand such a thing and its terrain, we lose the meaning conveyed by its mystery. Boonmee needs not understand death, but accept its strange and unknown consequences, and how they mingle with the consequences of his actions in life.

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