You can now read my write up on piracy, film culture and citizenship here on openDemocracy.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Year 2012
Year 2012 is leading me back to my emotional atlas: Pinter and Beckett, Bergman and Welles, these are going to be my mainstay. #writing
— Salik Shah (@salik) January 19, 2012
Read my latest post here:
The Capra Hyperbole: One Man, One Film
Friday, October 21, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: Misleading commercial of the Orient
Meditations on a film on the film
What is the significance of an embrace? A touch? In the Orient.
What is suffering: the buffalo, the monkey or the man?
180 degree: Beauty is the limit of truth. Solitude is Knowledge.
Time is constant: There is no arrival. There is no departure.
When you try to meditate on a film on the film, no matter how illogical or narrative-less you are, the soul of the substance is your subject.
Spirituality is an all pervading mood.
Joe can dissect the body. Cleanse it.
And all that could be is a misleading commercial of the Orient.
— The Auteur Age
Comments and Criticisms from the criterionforum.org:
There Is No End
What is spirituality? What is the essence of faith and belief? Who is God? Does life end?
Life doesn’t end, consciousness does. Life is cyclical; you live, you die, you decompose, and your body is then recycled back into living material. Therefore, the essence of our spirituality is not the knowledge of a physical end, but knowledge of the end of consciousness. God is the knowledge that there is a God. Faith is hope that our consciousness doesn’t end.
In this line of thinking death becomes God; death becomes life. Therefore, life is God.
This is what Apichatpong Weerasethakul understands; this is what his works represent; this is the use of repetition, and duality in his works. Spoken stories are repeated film to film, storylines repeat, characters, and actors are used over and over, they all die and come back to life. There is no end; his next film is his previous film is his current film.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the distillation of this ideology. The name alone tells you life doesn’t end; Boonmee tells us stories of his previous lives, his knowledge of a place from his past, and the realization that that place was his first birthplace (or so he believes).
His son tells us of the influence his father’s photography had on him, his search for the ‘monkey ghosts’, and ultimately his life as Boonmee’s son becomes in itself a previous life as he becomes his the subject of his own search (identity? truth? love?).
His wife treats him, and asks questions about the present. [“How is your husband?” She asks her sister. “I got rid of him.” Laughing] Thanks them for praying to her. She is an aberration; a literal ghost; a literal past life (her own and Boonmee’s).
The place is a past life. Nabua; communists murdered by the government… it’s violent history a distant memory (or not so much, given Thai current history… nothing ends), and betrayed by the peaceful, quiet setting.
The “Monkey Ghost,” and “fish sex”: Thai comic book character? Monster? Or… man as a previous form. If the theme of the film is the continuity of life (or rather that life never ends), then indeed it seems incredibly plausible this “monkey ghost” (even the name carries the weight of a possible evolutionary form) is the missing link… or some stage in evolution. If this is true, then the theme is doubled by Boonmee’s son; who has now devolved from man to apeman, through mating.Evolve, devolve, evolve… it doesn’t end, but continues.
Indeed the “fish sex” scene builds upon this idea; life, evolution as cyclical, repeated processes. A woman, a princess, has lost her beauty, but Boonmee still sees the beauty of her past life; age. He seduces her. A catfish… fish as some of the earliest complex beings (and the Mekong specifically dating back to the Miocene). She has sex with the evolutionary past; we evolve, devolve, and evolve again.
Life doesn’t end. There is no end.
— Wu Yong (mubi)
Death of Cinema
According to Apichatpong, the film is primarily about “objects and people that transform or hybridise”. A central theme is the transformation and possible extinction of cinema itself. The film consists of six reels each shot in a different cinematic style. The styles include, by the words of the director, “old cinema with stiff acting and classical staging”, “documentary style”, “costume drama” and “my kind of film when you see long takes of animals and people driving”. Apichatpong further explained in an interview with Bangkok Post: “When you make a film about recollection and death, you realise that cinema is also facing death. Uncle Boonmee is one of the last pictures shot on film – now everybody shoots digital. It’s my own little lamentation”.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul says that a man named Boonmee approached Phra Sripariyattiweti, the abbot of a Buddhist temple in his home town, claiming he could clearly remember his own previous lives while meditating. The abbot was so impressed with Boonmee’s ability that he published a book called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives in 1983. By the time Apichatpong read the book, Boonmee had died. The original idea was to adapt the book into a biographical film about Boonmee. However, that was soon abandoned to make room for a more personal film, while still using the book’s structure and content as inspiration. The stories and production designs were inspired by old television shows and Thai comic books, which often used simple plots and were filled with supernatural elements.
Filming took place between October 2009 and February 2010, as the weather conditions allowed, both in Bangkok and the northeast of Thailand, Isan. 16 mm film was used for budget reasons and preferred over digital video to give the film a look similar to the classic Thai cinema of the past.
— Elias Nahmias (mubi)
Theory Falls Flat On the Screen
“I consider it to be a work that never goes beyond the theoretical intentions of the director and which uses dramatic arbitrariness as an artistic posture.” —Eric Libiot
That’s the major flaw of this work which can be regarded as partly a further development of Apichatpong’s style which combined experimental cinema and national mythology, and partly an unsuccessful concretization of theoretical ideas which he didn’t manage to combine to a coherent whole. The problem in regards to the princess/catfish scene is definitely not its sexual weirdness, but the missing functionality of this interspersed episode in the overall film. The disjointed coherence of the film is mostly camouflaged throughout due to mythological devices, but a penetrative look at the interaction of separate scenes makes it clear that “Uncle Boonmee” is a less successful cinematic construct than his masterful previous works like “Syndromes And A Century.”
Also:
The fish fellatio scene is [] has to be understood as a mythological tale which Apichatpong adapted from the Polynesian legend of Tuna-roa. Tuna-roa, the father of all eels, lived in a swamp near Tami home. Tami’s spouse,Suki, visited the swamp daily to fill her calabash with water. One day, as Suki was filling her calabash, the eel-god leaped from the water and raped her.
—Apursansar (mubi)
Pure Cinema
Although it’s always clear just what’s happening on screen… the significance of what’s going on is as deliberately elusive… There’s such a rich correspondence and intricate relationship between the ideas represented by the film’s many different aspects that it seems to me that Weerasethakul is less concerned with delivering a specific Buddhist allegory with neatly decipherable symbols than he is with putting his audience in a state of mind where they will be susceptible to pondering the notions of transience, transition, transference and transformation in which the film traffics.
The film is preoccupied with crossing borders, be they political / geographic (Laos / Thailand), social (princess / subject), biological (human / animal), or existential (freedom / captivity; ugliness / beauty; self / other), and the biggie, lying within and behind all of those, is the border between life and death, upon which the film dwells for much of its running time. In fact, not knowing on which side of that particular border we are from time to time is part of the film’s strategy.
It’s an utterly gorgeous film, so see it in a cinema if you can, as it’s the kind of beauty that will be extremely hard to capture on domestic formats, since many of the compositions are extremely low contrast and Weerasethakul requires a large screen to deliver certain effects (in the sense that ‘dead’ sectors of the screen can be alive with possibilities, such as subtle movement in the undergrowth or the slow materialization—or not—of something).
— zedz
Ignorant. Indifferent. Inhuman.
[Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives] is better than his past two efforts. AW's staunch refusal to play his own game makes his films all the more annoying. He seems to be playing a comedic fairy tale, but he is unable to convince primarily through his inability to make human characters. This is especially telling in the one good on it's own scene in the movie. There's an interlude that I can only assume is one of the past lives of the title involving an ugly princess (more on that later) and a catfish. It plays the comedy and fairy tale nature perfectly and it was only toward the end I realized why I separated this scene from the others. These character's reactions and behavior's work because there is no human element to them and it's pure fairy tale 'nonsense'. He managed to find that sweet note that makes other adult fairy tales like Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast work. The problem with the main story is that he tries to add human weight to the characters and almost feels embarrassed by the fairy tale element which makes the dinner table scene not work. If the other characters had reacted much like the Laotian immigrant or had been fairy tale people like the princess this and later scenes with the ghost would work on some level, but they don't. Even stripped of these fairy tale elements though I find the main story unsatisfactory because the attempts at making humans fails and all we're really left with is grotesque shapes. Much like Chomet, but without the benefit of the distance of animation AW just loves to wallow in ugliness and tends to create caricatures to fit. There's something hateful or at least massively ignorant that I sense in these portrayals. Going back to that horrible dinner, which is in some way the centerpiece of the film, there's a disgust with the way AW shows the Laotian to lack spirituality by being the only one who doesn't accept a ghost and sasquatch thing at first glance. Also this isn't a critique so much as a nitpick, but why was the aunt so accepting of these magical creatures, but considers Boonmee crazy for accepting the his death is near? That's a strange set of priorities. I have a few more complaints in that direction, but it points more to how unconvinced of the situation I was rather than a straight up flaw in the film.
[] This is Ed Wood and (more closely) Ray Steckler territory. A number of the shots are plainly on set with the monkey ghost acting out of character (I believe it supposed to be the same monkey ghost from earlier). What's worst is that the on set photos clearly show a different species of creature and the plastic making up his face is plain. There is no attempt to make this fairy tale real or at least involving. While I can see someone getting enjoyment out of the other sections I can't understand what this interlude could provide to anybody. AW makes Noe look competent.
I do hope to eat my words some day, but today that is not going to happen.
While I see him as trying to make an enigma I don't think he actually succeeded at being particularly cryptic. Maybe it's my own lack of imagination, but I found the film, even the last sequence, surprisingly straight forward. I had just assumed that the final section was some time in the future, though Swo's hallucination suggestion is far more fun. The only sequence that I thinks manages to be cryptic is the still sequence. As for that, and I realize this is terribly dismissive, but I don't care how many things AW was trying to do if he can't succeed in presenting any of them well. It just comes off (and I did rewatch this sequence yesterday) as a lazy attempt to say things that he doesn't even seem to have a grasp on in an arty way. Rather than being artistic though it just comes off as incoherent for incoherence sake. That's a condescension I don't need.
As for I character I don't see any celebration. There seems to be none of this curiosity and definitely no wonderment you speak of. There doesn't seem to be any attempt I can see to present humans, but he's too afraid to go into the full metaphors or archetypes that he seems to be craving. Every portrayal reeks of cowardice or in the case of the none spiritual disgust.
—knives
Honest Criticism
I began with the short film, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, which is surprisingly good. The unseen presence at the core of the film could equally symbolise the historical injustices carried out against the indigenous population of the north-east ('Isaan'), and, specifically, against residents of Nabua in 1965, as it could a spiritual or ancestral presence and, as such, the short gains a resonance and relevance previously unseen in AW's work. As is often the case, however, he pushes the experimentation too far, to the detriment of the overall clarity of the piece. We are given, for example, an unnecessary and rather ugly shot of a lens being changed, and a somewhat pretentious, navel-gazing voice over, where an interview with the owners of the house and/or survivors of the Nabua massacre would have drawn the piece into sharper focus, and it is interesting / notable that some international commentators (eg. MUBI) have failed to pick up on the political underpinnings altogether. Still, this is both AW's first genuinely political film and also his most aesthetically stimulating, filled from beginning to end with roving lateral dolly shots that recall Tarkovsky, and a menacing sound design that make wonderful use of a poorly-oiled fan. In short, it's the best thing he's ever done, albeit a little slight - a suggestion of a larger, more important work to come.
A shame, therefore, that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives fails to live up to that promise. We may still be in Isaan, but AW shifts his focus, once again, to a wealthy character set ('landed gentry', as Boonmee is half-jokingly referred to at one point within the film) - unwilling, or perhaps simply unable, to indentify with the poor subsistance farmers who make up 99% of the population. As a result, we have a film which sentimentalises life in an extremely poor region of Thailand whilst failing to engage with the problems the inhabitants of that region have to deal with on a daily basis - extortionate lending, economic exploitation, corruption, poverty, violence against women, etc. Instead - and this is where it gets genuinely troubling - AW gives us Uncle Boonmee.
Uncle Boonmee is a nouveau riche Isaan landowner, a man in a position of power that could only be obtained through extreme cowboy capitalism and, almost certainly, through corruption and violence. Boonmee is the guy who would be doing the extortionate lending - and then sending in thugs with knvies and guns when the peasants fail to pay their 10% interest a month. Uncle Boonmee is also, we are informed, a killer of communists. He may even symbolically represent 'the Nation of Thailand', or something similar, a potentially interesting allegory that is never fully explored. Instead, time and again, AW goes out of his way to paint Uncle Boonmee as a nice and gentle guy, the worthy focus of our sympathies. Accepting his imminent death with a serene calm, never a harsh word escapes his mouth, let alone an order to kill. Pauly from Goodfellas has been disingenuously transformed into the Dalai Lama.
Then we have the red-eyed monkey ghosts who haunt Boonmee from the woods, which are hard to interpret as anything other than the ghost of the communist movement, by way of the modern-day UDD (red shirt) movement. In the short film, this barely-glimpsed presence felt organic, inevitable, there is a sense of the pheasants coming home to roost, of past injustices which have yet to be laid to rest. In the feature, however, this presence becomes simultaneously more threatening and more comical, and also, crucially, more 'primitive' (as the overall title of the project suggests) - a troubling representation of a workers movement, coming as it does from a member of the oppressing class. This possibly naive misrepresentation then flourishes into out-and-out racism in the character of Tong - Boonmee's younger, better-dressed relative, visiting from Bangkok. Whilst Boonmee may draw the audience's sympathies, Tong is the audience's gateway into Boonmee's world, perhaps even AW's alter-ego. And Tong is the only character in the film to speak Thai, not Isaan, even in the presence of his relatives. To understand how improbable this is, you have to understand that the ruling Chinese-Thai/Siamese and the indigenous people of Isaan are not just two different classes but also two different races - think of the English and the Irish in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. Most Isaan people are capable of speaking Thai, however, understandably, Isaan is their language of choice (Isaan being a regional combination of Lao, Thai and Khmer, different enough from Thai that the film required subtitles when screened in Bangkok last year). Whilst Tong might speak Thai in his day to day life in Bangkok, it is completely improbable that he would speak Thai in private conversation with his Isaan elders - indeed to do so would show a lack of respect. One must ask then, why AW has made this entirely unnaturalistic choice. The only conceivable answer is that Tong, and the Siamese language, are supposed to represent modernity, whilst Boonmee and the Isaan language represent the 'past' or the 'primitive' - a shockingly racist conceit.
On the other hand, yes, the film is well made, formally cogent, sporadically imaginative and provides effective lightweight entertainment for unengaged international audiences. On these terms, and these terms alone, it is undoubtably a succeess. The catfish sequence in particular makes for a pleasant interlude, recalling Mizoguchi by way of Borowczyk, yet without the burning sense of social injustice expressed by those master filmmakers. Boonmee's death within the cave is also a powerful, almost moving, sequence when detached from its context. However, none of this can or should distract from the inate prejudice that AW has yet to overcome, despite perhaps his own willing, whilst A Letter from Uncle Boonmee suggesta that he is potentially capable of so much more. It is a pity, therefore, that his premature anointing in Cannes will almost certainly stunt the self-criticism that his work still so sorely requires.
— nothing
Incredibly Political
"For fifteen years I had lived in a town called Khon Kaen at the centre of the region (Isaan), but I had never explored it as a whole. I doubt that many of the north-easterners do. This dry and arid land, despite its rich history, is quite off the map as a destination. I remember visiting various places with Khmer influences. But that's the limit of my exposure. Many of the people here seem to abandon these ruins and migrate to Bangkok to work as cheap labor. Once there, they are looked down upon because of their darker skin and a dialect that resembles those of our Laotian neighbors, presumed to be an unsophisticated bunch."
- Apichatpong Weerasethkaul, "The Memory of Nabua: A Note on the Primitive Project"
So I think the jabs at the Laotian provide a peek into the social hierarchy, and the "victims" (for lack of a better word, I'm doing this on the fly) becoming the "victimizers." And I think it's the ones who have moved to Bangkok who really complain about the Laotians.
It also points to how much history and tradition is being lost. Uncle Boonmee (the real one as well as the character) continually reincarnates in Isaan. Uncle Boonmee has the deepest ties to the area and the traditions. No one else seems to come close.
And I revise what I said before: a combination of the 1965 violence being more or less a slaughter of the villagers in search of Communists (some were Communists, many were not), plus an area legend that states that a 'widow ghost' abducts any man who enters her empire - takes them to join her other husbands in an invisible land (plus a couple other things about the current-day village not emphasized in the film), makes me think that the monkey spirits are broader than just hidden Communists.
— lady wakasa
References:
There is No End
The Film Experience
What is suffering: the buffalo, the monkey or the man?
180 degree: Beauty is the limit of truth. Solitude is Knowledge.
Time is constant: There is no arrival. There is no departure.
When you try to meditate on a film on the film, no matter how illogical or narrative-less you are, the soul of the substance is your subject.
Spirituality is an all pervading mood.
Joe can dissect the body. Cleanse it.
And all that could be is a misleading commercial of the Orient.
— The Auteur Age
Comments and Criticisms from the criterionforum.org:
There Is No End
What is spirituality? What is the essence of faith and belief? Who is God? Does life end?
Life doesn’t end, consciousness does. Life is cyclical; you live, you die, you decompose, and your body is then recycled back into living material. Therefore, the essence of our spirituality is not the knowledge of a physical end, but knowledge of the end of consciousness. God is the knowledge that there is a God. Faith is hope that our consciousness doesn’t end.
In this line of thinking death becomes God; death becomes life. Therefore, life is God.
This is what Apichatpong Weerasethakul understands; this is what his works represent; this is the use of repetition, and duality in his works. Spoken stories are repeated film to film, storylines repeat, characters, and actors are used over and over, they all die and come back to life. There is no end; his next film is his previous film is his current film.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the distillation of this ideology. The name alone tells you life doesn’t end; Boonmee tells us stories of his previous lives, his knowledge of a place from his past, and the realization that that place was his first birthplace (or so he believes).
His son tells us of the influence his father’s photography had on him, his search for the ‘monkey ghosts’, and ultimately his life as Boonmee’s son becomes in itself a previous life as he becomes his the subject of his own search (identity? truth? love?).
His wife treats him, and asks questions about the present. [“How is your husband?” She asks her sister. “I got rid of him.” Laughing] Thanks them for praying to her. She is an aberration; a literal ghost; a literal past life (her own and Boonmee’s).
The place is a past life. Nabua; communists murdered by the government… it’s violent history a distant memory (or not so much, given Thai current history… nothing ends), and betrayed by the peaceful, quiet setting.
The “Monkey Ghost,” and “fish sex”: Thai comic book character? Monster? Or… man as a previous form. If the theme of the film is the continuity of life (or rather that life never ends), then indeed it seems incredibly plausible this “monkey ghost” (even the name carries the weight of a possible evolutionary form) is the missing link… or some stage in evolution. If this is true, then the theme is doubled by Boonmee’s son; who has now devolved from man to apeman, through mating.Evolve, devolve, evolve… it doesn’t end, but continues.
Indeed the “fish sex” scene builds upon this idea; life, evolution as cyclical, repeated processes. A woman, a princess, has lost her beauty, but Boonmee still sees the beauty of her past life; age. He seduces her. A catfish… fish as some of the earliest complex beings (and the Mekong specifically dating back to the Miocene). She has sex with the evolutionary past; we evolve, devolve, and evolve again.
Life doesn’t end. There is no end.
— Wu Yong (mubi)
Death of Cinema
According to Apichatpong, the film is primarily about “objects and people that transform or hybridise”. A central theme is the transformation and possible extinction of cinema itself. The film consists of six reels each shot in a different cinematic style. The styles include, by the words of the director, “old cinema with stiff acting and classical staging”, “documentary style”, “costume drama” and “my kind of film when you see long takes of animals and people driving”. Apichatpong further explained in an interview with Bangkok Post: “When you make a film about recollection and death, you realise that cinema is also facing death. Uncle Boonmee is one of the last pictures shot on film – now everybody shoots digital. It’s my own little lamentation”.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul says that a man named Boonmee approached Phra Sripariyattiweti, the abbot of a Buddhist temple in his home town, claiming he could clearly remember his own previous lives while meditating. The abbot was so impressed with Boonmee’s ability that he published a book called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives in 1983. By the time Apichatpong read the book, Boonmee had died. The original idea was to adapt the book into a biographical film about Boonmee. However, that was soon abandoned to make room for a more personal film, while still using the book’s structure and content as inspiration. The stories and production designs were inspired by old television shows and Thai comic books, which often used simple plots and were filled with supernatural elements.
Filming took place between October 2009 and February 2010, as the weather conditions allowed, both in Bangkok and the northeast of Thailand, Isan. 16 mm film was used for budget reasons and preferred over digital video to give the film a look similar to the classic Thai cinema of the past.
— Elias Nahmias (mubi)
Theory Falls Flat On the Screen
“I consider it to be a work that never goes beyond the theoretical intentions of the director and which uses dramatic arbitrariness as an artistic posture.” —Eric Libiot
That’s the major flaw of this work which can be regarded as partly a further development of Apichatpong’s style which combined experimental cinema and national mythology, and partly an unsuccessful concretization of theoretical ideas which he didn’t manage to combine to a coherent whole. The problem in regards to the princess/catfish scene is definitely not its sexual weirdness, but the missing functionality of this interspersed episode in the overall film. The disjointed coherence of the film is mostly camouflaged throughout due to mythological devices, but a penetrative look at the interaction of separate scenes makes it clear that “Uncle Boonmee” is a less successful cinematic construct than his masterful previous works like “Syndromes And A Century.”
Also:
The fish fellatio scene is [] has to be understood as a mythological tale which Apichatpong adapted from the Polynesian legend of Tuna-roa. Tuna-roa, the father of all eels, lived in a swamp near Tami home. Tami’s spouse,Suki, visited the swamp daily to fill her calabash with water. One day, as Suki was filling her calabash, the eel-god leaped from the water and raped her.
—Apursansar (mubi)
Pure Cinema
Although it’s always clear just what’s happening on screen… the significance of what’s going on is as deliberately elusive… There’s such a rich correspondence and intricate relationship between the ideas represented by the film’s many different aspects that it seems to me that Weerasethakul is less concerned with delivering a specific Buddhist allegory with neatly decipherable symbols than he is with putting his audience in a state of mind where they will be susceptible to pondering the notions of transience, transition, transference and transformation in which the film traffics.
The film is preoccupied with crossing borders, be they political / geographic (Laos / Thailand), social (princess / subject), biological (human / animal), or existential (freedom / captivity; ugliness / beauty; self / other), and the biggie, lying within and behind all of those, is the border between life and death, upon which the film dwells for much of its running time. In fact, not knowing on which side of that particular border we are from time to time is part of the film’s strategy.
It’s an utterly gorgeous film, so see it in a cinema if you can, as it’s the kind of beauty that will be extremely hard to capture on domestic formats, since many of the compositions are extremely low contrast and Weerasethakul requires a large screen to deliver certain effects (in the sense that ‘dead’ sectors of the screen can be alive with possibilities, such as subtle movement in the undergrowth or the slow materialization—or not—of something).
— zedz
Ignorant. Indifferent. Inhuman.
[Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives] is better than his past two efforts. AW's staunch refusal to play his own game makes his films all the more annoying. He seems to be playing a comedic fairy tale, but he is unable to convince primarily through his inability to make human characters. This is especially telling in the one good on it's own scene in the movie. There's an interlude that I can only assume is one of the past lives of the title involving an ugly princess (more on that later) and a catfish. It plays the comedy and fairy tale nature perfectly and it was only toward the end I realized why I separated this scene from the others. These character's reactions and behavior's work because there is no human element to them and it's pure fairy tale 'nonsense'. He managed to find that sweet note that makes other adult fairy tales like Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast work. The problem with the main story is that he tries to add human weight to the characters and almost feels embarrassed by the fairy tale element which makes the dinner table scene not work. If the other characters had reacted much like the Laotian immigrant or had been fairy tale people like the princess this and later scenes with the ghost would work on some level, but they don't. Even stripped of these fairy tale elements though I find the main story unsatisfactory because the attempts at making humans fails and all we're really left with is grotesque shapes. Much like Chomet, but without the benefit of the distance of animation AW just loves to wallow in ugliness and tends to create caricatures to fit. There's something hateful or at least massively ignorant that I sense in these portrayals. Going back to that horrible dinner, which is in some way the centerpiece of the film, there's a disgust with the way AW shows the Laotian to lack spirituality by being the only one who doesn't accept a ghost and sasquatch thing at first glance. Also this isn't a critique so much as a nitpick, but why was the aunt so accepting of these magical creatures, but considers Boonmee crazy for accepting the his death is near? That's a strange set of priorities. I have a few more complaints in that direction, but it points more to how unconvinced of the situation I was rather than a straight up flaw in the film.
[] This is Ed Wood and (more closely) Ray Steckler territory. A number of the shots are plainly on set with the monkey ghost acting out of character (I believe it supposed to be the same monkey ghost from earlier). What's worst is that the on set photos clearly show a different species of creature and the plastic making up his face is plain. There is no attempt to make this fairy tale real or at least involving. While I can see someone getting enjoyment out of the other sections I can't understand what this interlude could provide to anybody. AW makes Noe look competent.
I do hope to eat my words some day, but today that is not going to happen.
While I see him as trying to make an enigma I don't think he actually succeeded at being particularly cryptic. Maybe it's my own lack of imagination, but I found the film, even the last sequence, surprisingly straight forward. I had just assumed that the final section was some time in the future, though Swo's hallucination suggestion is far more fun. The only sequence that I thinks manages to be cryptic is the still sequence. As for that, and I realize this is terribly dismissive, but I don't care how many things AW was trying to do if he can't succeed in presenting any of them well. It just comes off (and I did rewatch this sequence yesterday) as a lazy attempt to say things that he doesn't even seem to have a grasp on in an arty way. Rather than being artistic though it just comes off as incoherent for incoherence sake. That's a condescension I don't need.
As for I character I don't see any celebration. There seems to be none of this curiosity and definitely no wonderment you speak of. There doesn't seem to be any attempt I can see to present humans, but he's too afraid to go into the full metaphors or archetypes that he seems to be craving. Every portrayal reeks of cowardice or in the case of the none spiritual disgust.
—knives
Honest Criticism
I began with the short film, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, which is surprisingly good. The unseen presence at the core of the film could equally symbolise the historical injustices carried out against the indigenous population of the north-east ('Isaan'), and, specifically, against residents of Nabua in 1965, as it could a spiritual or ancestral presence and, as such, the short gains a resonance and relevance previously unseen in AW's work. As is often the case, however, he pushes the experimentation too far, to the detriment of the overall clarity of the piece. We are given, for example, an unnecessary and rather ugly shot of a lens being changed, and a somewhat pretentious, navel-gazing voice over, where an interview with the owners of the house and/or survivors of the Nabua massacre would have drawn the piece into sharper focus, and it is interesting / notable that some international commentators (eg. MUBI) have failed to pick up on the political underpinnings altogether. Still, this is both AW's first genuinely political film and also his most aesthetically stimulating, filled from beginning to end with roving lateral dolly shots that recall Tarkovsky, and a menacing sound design that make wonderful use of a poorly-oiled fan. In short, it's the best thing he's ever done, albeit a little slight - a suggestion of a larger, more important work to come.
A shame, therefore, that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives fails to live up to that promise. We may still be in Isaan, but AW shifts his focus, once again, to a wealthy character set ('landed gentry', as Boonmee is half-jokingly referred to at one point within the film) - unwilling, or perhaps simply unable, to indentify with the poor subsistance farmers who make up 99% of the population. As a result, we have a film which sentimentalises life in an extremely poor region of Thailand whilst failing to engage with the problems the inhabitants of that region have to deal with on a daily basis - extortionate lending, economic exploitation, corruption, poverty, violence against women, etc. Instead - and this is where it gets genuinely troubling - AW gives us Uncle Boonmee.
Uncle Boonmee is a nouveau riche Isaan landowner, a man in a position of power that could only be obtained through extreme cowboy capitalism and, almost certainly, through corruption and violence. Boonmee is the guy who would be doing the extortionate lending - and then sending in thugs with knvies and guns when the peasants fail to pay their 10% interest a month. Uncle Boonmee is also, we are informed, a killer of communists. He may even symbolically represent 'the Nation of Thailand', or something similar, a potentially interesting allegory that is never fully explored. Instead, time and again, AW goes out of his way to paint Uncle Boonmee as a nice and gentle guy, the worthy focus of our sympathies. Accepting his imminent death with a serene calm, never a harsh word escapes his mouth, let alone an order to kill. Pauly from Goodfellas has been disingenuously transformed into the Dalai Lama.
Then we have the red-eyed monkey ghosts who haunt Boonmee from the woods, which are hard to interpret as anything other than the ghost of the communist movement, by way of the modern-day UDD (red shirt) movement. In the short film, this barely-glimpsed presence felt organic, inevitable, there is a sense of the pheasants coming home to roost, of past injustices which have yet to be laid to rest. In the feature, however, this presence becomes simultaneously more threatening and more comical, and also, crucially, more 'primitive' (as the overall title of the project suggests) - a troubling representation of a workers movement, coming as it does from a member of the oppressing class. This possibly naive misrepresentation then flourishes into out-and-out racism in the character of Tong - Boonmee's younger, better-dressed relative, visiting from Bangkok. Whilst Boonmee may draw the audience's sympathies, Tong is the audience's gateway into Boonmee's world, perhaps even AW's alter-ego. And Tong is the only character in the film to speak Thai, not Isaan, even in the presence of his relatives. To understand how improbable this is, you have to understand that the ruling Chinese-Thai/Siamese and the indigenous people of Isaan are not just two different classes but also two different races - think of the English and the Irish in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. Most Isaan people are capable of speaking Thai, however, understandably, Isaan is their language of choice (Isaan being a regional combination of Lao, Thai and Khmer, different enough from Thai that the film required subtitles when screened in Bangkok last year). Whilst Tong might speak Thai in his day to day life in Bangkok, it is completely improbable that he would speak Thai in private conversation with his Isaan elders - indeed to do so would show a lack of respect. One must ask then, why AW has made this entirely unnaturalistic choice. The only conceivable answer is that Tong, and the Siamese language, are supposed to represent modernity, whilst Boonmee and the Isaan language represent the 'past' or the 'primitive' - a shockingly racist conceit.
On the other hand, yes, the film is well made, formally cogent, sporadically imaginative and provides effective lightweight entertainment for unengaged international audiences. On these terms, and these terms alone, it is undoubtably a succeess. The catfish sequence in particular makes for a pleasant interlude, recalling Mizoguchi by way of Borowczyk, yet without the burning sense of social injustice expressed by those master filmmakers. Boonmee's death within the cave is also a powerful, almost moving, sequence when detached from its context. However, none of this can or should distract from the inate prejudice that AW has yet to overcome, despite perhaps his own willing, whilst A Letter from Uncle Boonmee suggesta that he is potentially capable of so much more. It is a pity, therefore, that his premature anointing in Cannes will almost certainly stunt the self-criticism that his work still so sorely requires.
— nothing
Incredibly Political
"For fifteen years I had lived in a town called Khon Kaen at the centre of the region (Isaan), but I had never explored it as a whole. I doubt that many of the north-easterners do. This dry and arid land, despite its rich history, is quite off the map as a destination. I remember visiting various places with Khmer influences. But that's the limit of my exposure. Many of the people here seem to abandon these ruins and migrate to Bangkok to work as cheap labor. Once there, they are looked down upon because of their darker skin and a dialect that resembles those of our Laotian neighbors, presumed to be an unsophisticated bunch."
- Apichatpong Weerasethkaul, "The Memory of Nabua: A Note on the Primitive Project"
So I think the jabs at the Laotian provide a peek into the social hierarchy, and the "victims" (for lack of a better word, I'm doing this on the fly) becoming the "victimizers." And I think it's the ones who have moved to Bangkok who really complain about the Laotians.
It also points to how much history and tradition is being lost. Uncle Boonmee (the real one as well as the character) continually reincarnates in Isaan. Uncle Boonmee has the deepest ties to the area and the traditions. No one else seems to come close.
And I revise what I said before: a combination of the 1965 violence being more or less a slaughter of the villagers in search of Communists (some were Communists, many were not), plus an area legend that states that a 'widow ghost' abducts any man who enters her empire - takes them to join her other husbands in an invisible land (plus a couple other things about the current-day village not emphasized in the film), makes me think that the monkey spirits are broader than just hidden Communists.
— lady wakasa
References:
There is No End
The Film Experience
Friday, February 18, 2011
Crazy Windmills: Signs of Life
"Whilst in Greece I walked around the mountains of Crete where I came across a valley. I had to sit down because I was sure I had gone insane. Before me lay 10,000 windmills—it was like a field of flowers gone mad—turning and turning with these tiny squeaking noises. I sat down and pinched myself. ‘I have either gone insane or have been something very significant indeed.’ Of course, it turned out that the windmills were for real and this central image became a pivotal point of the film, landscape in complete ecstasy and fantastic madness. I knew as I stood there that I would return one day to make a film. Had I never seen the windmills, I would not have made the connecting between this fantastic landscape and the von Arnim story, which I read only later on."
– On ‘Signs of Life’ from ‘Herzog on Herzog’
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