Uncle Boonmee: First Truly Great Film of the 2010s

“I loved it -- very strange and very beautiful.” I heard a young man saying this to his companions with ecstasy in his voice as he walked out of a nearly sold-out screening of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" last night in Manhattan. I had pretty much the same response. “Uncle Boonmee” has flaws, but it is also uniquely moving and an artistic achievement of the highest order.

The film, which won top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, was written and directed by Thailand’s resident genius Apichatpong Weerasethakul. (It is said that his friends call him Joe. I will refer to him as AW.)

Cannes continues to set itself apart as one of the greatest artistic organizations in the world. That a world-renowned festival would champion a film as radical as “Uncle Boonmee” is remarkable. Somehow the philistines have not been able to take over that festival, as they have taken over just about everything else in the world. The barbarians are at the gate, but true cinephiles so far have been able to keep them out of the Cannes castle. This is very encouraging.

*************************

Being highly avant-garde, “Uncle Boonmee” will no doubt be looked at differently by everyone who sees it. In fact, every person will surely see it from numerous perspectives. In the first hour, I saw the film as a celebration of traditional peasant culture. Intellectuals typically spurn rural culture quite vehemently. AW pushes against that tendency by going out to the middle of the Thai jungle and hiring a group of peasants essentially to play themselves.

He gives them scenarios to enact that mix traditional Buddhist culture with classic peasant folklore, including ghost stories and fables about princesses and talking catfish. But there is also a bizarre storyline having to do with mysterious creatures with red eyes. This seemed way out of step with the rest of the film. The little bit of explanation that is given about these ape-like animals (from a man who becomes one of them) is that they are a new species mysteriously appearing on the earth.

I wondered gravely for a while about this outlandish element that AW had introduced. Was he going off the deep end? Would UFOs enter the film next? But in time what I saw in this use of weird creatures was AW expanding his palette dramatically -- breathtakingly. Instead of just contemplating life as it is lived today by humans and other animals, his vision expanded to encompass life forms from the future as well. The dramatic span of life was on AW's mind -- not just the past and the present, but also the distant future. AW was contemplating life itself, including the open-endedness and unknowability of evolution.

This breadth of vision captivated me in a way that a work of art never has before. I had never looked at life in quite this way. When I say that "Uncle Boonmee" is a major artistic achievement, I mean that it showed me a new way to think and feel about life. It also did it in ways that are radically original.

AW, having a limitless artistic imagination, even added something profound in the last 10 minutes. Just when you feel the film couldn't get any broader, AW expands his vision yet again. Throughout the film, we had been thinking about organisms in different time periods. At the end, AW suddenly presents the main characters as so complex that each cannot be thought of as just one thing. If you look inside just one organism, he seemed to say, there is as much multiplicity as when you look across hundreds of millions of organisms in different evolutionary epochs. If you want to see the vast expanse of evolution, just look inside yourself.

I won't reveal how AW does this, but I can say that it made my audience audibly gasp. It also made the last 10 minutes of the film exhilarating. For some reason, it also made me start to cry.

But what of the flaws? There are several. "Uncle Boonmee" is so slow paced that it can become boring in spots. AW was also working with such low-quality equipment that the picture can be quite muddy. In general, the film has a sloppy look to it. I sensed that AW couldn't afford to hire a crew to do the kind of immaculate set decoration, lighting, and costumes that made his last film, "Syndromes and a Century," (which was on my top 10 list of 2007) so visually arresting. "Uncle Boonmee" is a feast of ideas and feelings, but visually it's pretty disappointing.

The cinematography is also surprisingly dull. AW is known as a master of mise-en-scene, but here it seemed that the peasants he was working with were composing his shots. Often it seemed he did little more than set the camera on a tripod and turn it on. The visual composition of shots was at times so flat as to be sleep-inducing. Combined with the slow pacing, this sometimes felt like Chinese water torture.

It almost seemed like AW was deeply inspired when he conceived the film, but not so inspired during the shoot. It's got to be both. The cinematography's got to give you goose bumps, not just the ideas at the root of the story.

But uninspired cinematography cannot sink "Uncle Boonmee." It is one of the greatest films of not just the year, but also the decade. It is the first truly great film of the 2010s. Thank you, Cannes, for ensuring that this film got a worldwide audience.