uncle boonmee who can recall his past lives

Please be aware this is less a review than it is a speculative and tendentious meditation on the film.

It's a fortnight since I saw Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I prefer to do reviews within a couple of days but moving studio, The Other Room, Counting Backwards, residency applications and sorting out my portfolio etc, and last week's exhibitions SAFE and Ghosts... got in the way.

This is perhaps appropriate. The film takes its time and is episodic, the various parts seeming to have little to do with each other. But perhaps there are thematic strands that can be identified.

One common theme is making a journey. Often without going far, either in terms of distance or from what you know.

The film opens with a water buffalo working itself free from the tree it's been tied to and walking and sometimes running through fields and into the jungle. Eventually someone finds the buffalo eating leaves and leads it back. The half-light, the greenery, the leisurely pace and lack of explanation are all beautiful in different ways. So too is the sound. The breathing of the animal, the sounds of the forest, the lack of music telling you what to think.

Shortly afterwards we have the first of two journeys where the main protagonists are carried. On this occasion a lengthy sequence within a car as it carries one character, Boonmee's sister-in-law Jen, to Boonmee's farm. Sometimes the camera focuses on the view through the windows. Or of the windows since the light and the imperfections and dust on the window reduce the ability to see through the glass. Sometimes the camera focuses on the road ahead. We are always aware of the sound and the vibration of the car.

The second journey is that taken by the disfigured princess carried through the jungle to a lake where she encounters and has sex with a talking catfish. Some of the journey is viewed through trees much like the journey of the buffalo, although this journey travels the opposite direction across the screen. Some of the journey is viewed from the point of view of the princess.

That sexual encounter with the catfish is exactly as funny (you might equally say daft or ridiculous) as it seems. Exactly as strange and troubling. But I'm more interested in the funny/daft/ridiculous aspect. One of the strengths of Uncle Boonmee... is the ability to not take itself too seriously.

You will laugh frequently at this film. Whether at sex with catfish, at Jen asking Boonmee's lost son Boonsong who has returned as a monkey spirit 'Why did you grow your hair so long?', at Jen chiding the ghost of her sister Huay for being a 'crazy ghost', at Tong's discomfort at monastic life, and much more besides. A film about dying, about the permeability or otherwise of the veil between life and death, past and present, can't afford to take itself too seriously.

To pluck an utterly absurd example out of the air who is more profound, born-again Dylan or the younger mercurial bullshitter of the mid-sixties? If you need to think about that you probably don't laugh enough. Or take a look at the flashing lights and Buddhist kitsch of the altar at Boonmee's funeral.

But I've distracted myself. Journeys. Another major journey is when Huay leads Boonmee, Jen and Tong through the jungle to a cave through which they descend until they can go no further in the dark. Huay drains Boonmee's kidney onto the cave floor (Tong shuffling out of the way of the stream as it heads toward his shoes) and in the morning Boonmee is dead and Huay vanished.

Earlier there's another sunlit journey to pair with that in the car. Boonmee leads Jen through his farm stopping off at his beehives to allow her to sample the honey.

A second theme is the passage of time. Several sequences almost happen in real time. The water buffalo's escape and recovery, the car journey, the first occasion when Boonmee's kidney is drained and the process recorded, the descent into the cave.

But it's not all about time being slowed in cinematic terms. Huay says 'I have no concept of time any more'. Boonsong tells the story of how as a photographer he became fascinated by monkey spirits in the trees and began to pursue them, eventually mating with one and transforming.

Later Boonmee tells a story of his own about a vision of a future city. As Boonsong's story was told in montage Boonmee's story is told or rather augmented by still images. They show young men dressed as soldiers, sometimes with monkey men, often in jokey poses. It's like an absurd version of Chris Marker's La jetée.

From following a water-buffalo in real time to an overview of a whole life in a future city in just a few still images time is stretched and compressed. The future, past and present collide and interpenetrate. The present can even be duplicated when Jen and Tong go for a meal at the end of the film while simultaneously watching tv.

Perhaps this is the significance of journeys. A journey is its own time, a shifting 'now'. Only between journeys does time become confused. There are rituals to mark the passage of time but the fact they are repeated makes each iteration of each ritual part of the same time with the other iterations. So each meal is part of the same meal, each draining of Boonmee's kidneys is part of same draining until Huay ends the cycle, every bedtime is the same bedtime.

Those meals. They mostly go uneaten. The first evening meal is interrupted by the slow materialisation of Huay like a reverse Cheshire cat and then by the arrival of Boonsong. Jen and Tong's meal doesn't seem to happen. Instead they sit glumly at a table in a restaurant where there seems to be karaoke singing without food without talking.

Food then may be a third theme. People do eat in the film. Tamarinds are taken from trees. Honey is eaten from combs pulled from beehives. Rice is served after the funeral. Rather than a social ritual or something centrally important it's something that happens incidentally, opportunistically.

Except there's not much more food in the film. The ghost Huay is offered food but doesn't eat. Boonmee is a farmer producing tamarinds and honey and probably more. Jen throws a tamarind to a dog. But like the other rituals, the draining of Boonmee's kidneys, going to sleep at night there's perhaps no need to show it in detail. It's indicated and that's all that's needed.

I've taken a wandering non-sequential trip through some selected parts of the film trying to avoid giving any information that isn't in the film. Other than my own possibly entirely false interpretations of what it might 'mean'. If we assume it means anything. I think this is appropriate. The episodic nature of the film where whole passages remain unexplained and apparently unrelated invites this kind of exploration.

Trying to reduce the film - any worthwhile film or piece of art - to a single message or meaning is almost to say there was no point in making this film. Art like life is complex and multifaceted. It means several things at once often in contradiction to one another.

A couple of inaccurate comparisons might help illustrate this. One is with Terrence Malik's Thin Red Line. There are superficial similarities especially the setting and the pace. But curiously while Malik's film is more firmly rooted in a recognisable genre and concentrated on the lives of a group of men Weerasethakul's film is ultimately more about people than it is about nature.

Of course Malik's film is about more than genre or landscape in the same way that Uncle Boonmee... is about more than people. As we've already established.

The other inaccurate comparison is with Tarkovsky. This one is my own inaccurate comparison and I had Stalker in mind when I made it. It was not so much to do with setting or themes or plot as to do with a philosophical inquisitiveness and a trust in the audience. There is that but Weerasethakul is less directive than Tarkovsky. His characters don't engage in the same slightly unrealistic philosophical discussions that Tarkovsky's do. There is no central quest however meaningless and unexplained.

What does unite Weerasethakul with Tarkovsky and Malik, and also with Marker, is an understanding that film doesn't have to be such a painfully literal medium. What you see is not necessarily what is there, what you are told or overhear is not necessarily true. The filmmaker trusts you to construct your own film from the clues they've provided you with. All you have to do is engage with the film and remember to carry it out of the cinema in your head when you leave.

So the cave into which Huay, Boonmee, Jen and Tong descend might be a womb as Boonmee speculates. It might be Plato's cave. It might just be a cave. It might be all of these and more. The film doesn't really care what you think. It offers you the cave, the wandering buffalo, the ghosts and spirits, the car journey, the Buddhist kitsch to take as literally or as figuratively as you like. It's a film that trusts you. Trust the film and make up your own mind.