Dena Beard Introduces “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - An Introduction
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul goes by the name “Joe” in the United States, a nickname he picked up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago nearly two decades ago. I’m afraid that here forward, I too will have to reduce his proper name down to the familiar and refer to Weerasethakul as Joe, so please forgive, but don’t forget, this bizarre, but somehow appropriate, misnomer.
The abbot of a Buddhist monastery close to Joe’s hometown remembered a man called Boonmee who, while meditating, could clearly see past lives “playing behind his closed eyes like a movie.” Intrigued by the possibility of exploring reincarnation through film, the man who we are calling Joe sets about the task of telling the deathbed stories of a man called Boonmee. Joe, however, does not script directly from the abbot’s book relaying Boonmee’s past lives. Instead, he talks to local villagers, gathering ghost stories and folk tales that mythologize a wash of violence and political disappearances related to a communist insurgency in the 1960s, and he casts as the main characters of this film a local welder and a singer. Asking the non-professional actors and crew for constant input, the script evolved during the course of filming rather than at the outset. Their memories and Joe’s infuse the recollections of Boonmee, moving back and forth between frank descriptions of profound personal loss, visitations from the world beyond, and an implicit agreement that our souls can exist everywhere—in animals, in mythical beings, in each other. According to the original text, Boonmee sees and feels himself as a buffalo, a fish, and a roaming monkey man, but these meditations intermingle with the real-life memories of the director, cast, and crew, and all of these permutations of “Boonmee” become one wandering spirit.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives is definitively and perhaps defiantly a Thai film, inspired by Thai television shows shot on 16-millimeter that Joe watched as a child. These were soap operas with princesses in elaborate getups, or horror movies, with lighting dark enough to hide badly made costumes and glowing red eyes peering out of a forest to indicate the location of monsters—but regardless of genre, phantoms were pervasive in Thai motion pictures. Perhaps this is why Joe’s cinematography always has a specter-like quality, gliding through the foliage and the rooms of the house like an ethereal predator. The camera is an impassive, otherworldly presence, it moves quietly, calmly, allowing the viewer breathing space and room to interrogate the way the machine mediates and sometimes manipulates the tentative narratives unfolding before it.
In an interview, Joe explained that he thinks of films as architectural spaces, holding the potential for meditation, a place where personal, political, and spiritual perspectives can layer upon each other in both spatial and psychological ways. He was raised in a province of Northeast Thailand, an incredibly beautiful but notoriously lawless area prone to infighting and rebellions. His early film, Mysterious Object at Noon, is narrated by outcasts from this region. Their various stories weave together as an exquisite corpse, with one person building on the previous without knowing what has come before. Eventually, a story about child slavery turns into a supernatural case of alien abduction, and we see firsthand the beauty and tragedy of real-time mythmaking. The film itself is impossible to label—it isn’t documentary, sci-fi, tragedy, or comedy—but in contrast to the disjunctive impulse of similar models, Richard Linklater’s Slacker for instance, it retains a flexible, but strangely cohesive, storyline. Joe’s transitions between different realities, between human and nonhuman, fact and fiction, natural and manmade, convey this sensuous complexity of narrative within landscapes of political upheaval and economic poverty. They are cinematic experiments in storytelling firmly rooted in everyday Thai reality.
Joe channels the phantom landscapes of Thai TV to dissolve divisions between life and afterlife, and so his cinema is a rich platform for exploring both Deleuzian and Buddhist understandings of time. Uncle Boonmee contains a few points of disjunction: a fundamental split before and after death, the incarnation of the past within the present, and a final sequence that demonstrates a possible simultaneity. None of these are dealt with particularly dramatically and we see that even in the most banal scenarios all pasts and futures fully exist only as they are conjured within the present: Boonmee sits with his sister-in-law, his dead wife, and his monkey-man son as they pass funeral photos around the dinner table. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze saw cinema as a kind of time machine, in my view, a dystopian one, where the past superseded and fractured the present until it frustrated any attempts to realize the future. Uncle Boonmee certainly plays with this trope, but its neorealist/melodramatic composite of real life stories and local mythology is more than anything a vehicle for interpersonal storytelling.
Real-life fictions compel cinematic facts, and vice versa, of course. Uncle Boonmee explores disparate realities of the man Boonmee by relying on collective input, and so the film refuses any kind of authoritative hold on Boonmee’s story. In Buddhist countries, it is taken for granted that we are never one single thing from birth to death and it would be absurd to try to control the outcome of an event or a life. Consequently, for a director coming from this tradition, filmmaking is fundamentally a struggle; movies are a synthetic transformation of real substance into the fixed perspective of celluloid. In response, Apichatpong, as Joe, cobbles together a cast and crew of non-professionals to tell the story of Uncle Boonmee—many voices echo from a singe mouthpiece. As viewers, we are left to wander within its open durational spaces, meditating on the difference between free-associative documentary and biographical fiction, and on the possibility of a more profound kind of coexistence.
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Dena Beard introduced Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center on November 15, 2011.
