UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES: A guided meditation
Rating: 👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻
As the lights fell I couldn’t remember if I had turned off the stove. This uncertainty produced the possibility that while I watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) for the first time, my house was burning down.
Despite the charismatic, contextually enriching (and without spoiling) introduction by an Austin Film Society programmer, half my head was filled with smoke. I bought a chocolate chip cookie in the lobby in the spirit of easygoing, put it in my pocket for later, dispelling the fire. But I had lesson plans to fill out for the coming days and my unit plan was almost a week overdue. Even the choice to see this movie at 10 p.m. while I was recovering from a cold felt misguided.
So often, everything is wrong. Doomed.
Then with a soft smile on my face, I was falling asleep within an hour of the runtime.
Like so many of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works, Uncle Boonmee induces meditation. The film is inspired by a monk’s writings, and regardless of what comes and goes onscreen, a spirit of mindful embodiment and planetary entanglement radiates from its hissing core. Cicadas, crickets, wind in the palms, and the touch of summer heat.
The people who move through this world.
Gorgeously balanced compositions appear without drawing attention to themselves, they seem to emerge from the natural movements of the principals—a small extended family unit we follow through time, illness, and death. And likewise these profound themes do not make a big splash. They fade in and out of the scenery without melodrama, maybe with a sense of unease, one that soon melts into calm acceptance.
It’s not necessarily encouraged to dream your way through Weerasethakul, but like listening to Grouper, allowing your un/consciousness to shape around the ambient sound is a part of the spell.
Another part of the spell is to surrender to the moments as they unfold. The same way Tropical Malady (2004) and Cemetery of Splendor (2015) lapse in and out of myth or fantasy without breaking from apparent reality, so too does Uncle Boonmee present ghosts, legends, and animal spirits matter-of-factly.
As presented, none of it is unbelievable. I could feel the possibilities of my everyday bloom with every scene. Nothing is fixed.
Moments of absurdity that could be standout set pieces or shocking revelations instead simply occur, or dovetail with static shots of the wind moving through the environment. Here, the appearance of a god is exactly as important as the sound and sight of a river’s current, filmed from underwater, so that the universe is bubbling, scattered, just below the roar of a waterfall.
This is something that happens.
Under Weerasethakul’s direction, every moment of the movie is reduced to inhales and exhales of memory, detached from overdetermined movie language. He trusts in the audience to adapt to the montage of many lives, real and unreal, impossible and otherwise.
At times we watch our characters falling asleep, watching television, staring into space. This ordinary world is presented thoughtfully, gently, without a narrative sweep. If anything, it encourages us to take pleasure in the nothing that waits in between the eventfulness of our days. Nothing to unscroll, nothing buzzing, nothing alone, for itself—waiting for you!
To watch on 35mm was a gift. The scratches and pops of the print dance across the surface of the movie, seeming to emanate from the jungle or hospital room, small flashes of color everywhere. A movie of the magic that comes from pausing.
When I got home, driving without music, I pulled onto my street with absentminded automation to find my house standing, quietly in the dark. I was glad to remember when I reached into my pocket, I’d gotten a cookie for myself.