Uncle Boonmee who can Recall his Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Winner Palm d’Or

This is not going to be a sensationalist text about how mysticism + zoophilia + politics = Palme d’Or. Nor is it some cheap joke about a complicated name. When we are faced with multiple lives of the same man, on the same screen, within the same film, this is not a story which can be told in a hurry. Whilst usually emotion gives way to reason and most contemporary art forms want to be food for glitterati thought, making a ghost film and thanking the spirits for a festival award is an act of courage.


Uncle Boonmee who can Recall his Past Lives (Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat) is part of a larger multi-platform project entitled Primitive, involving humans, lights, the North Eastern Thai jungle and something more. The main character is a simple man (played by Thanapat Saisaymar, himself a humble construction worker from Bangkok). On his sickbed, Boonmee awaits death, remembering his previous incarnations and rediscovering lost loved ones. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s sixth feature is a look backwards, not only to a time when human beings didn’t pretend to be the only creatures with souls, but also to an innocent, naïve cinema, in which little red lights as eyes saved the monsters in bad quality costumes from banality.

After an ironic beginning, the film offers an almost two-hour journey, encountering animals, caves and abandoned jewellery in a river. Starting from a more explicit script, Uncle Boonmee became a meditation that according to Weerasethakul “respects the audience’s imagination”. Considering that the writer-director studied architecture before filmmaking, when he pauses the story to linger on shooting precious and beautiful places it’s hardly surprising. “Attention, death!”, seem to say the home scenes of the present. “Attention, a chapter ends here and another one begins”, reply the interiors, lit by hazy, otherworldly colours, the perfect setting for a reunion of lives. As in Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady, the past contains long frames of vegetation and white noise that don’t seem to seek any attention. Each space has its own aura.

In 2006, Syndromes and a Century, featuring a Buddhist monk playing the guitar and two doctors falling in love at work, offended the Thai authorities’ eyes and morals. The director refused to cut the problematic sequences, but replaced them with black frames: he wanted the public to know that something was missing. Now, a few years later, the initiator of the Free Thai Cinema Movement has built a metaphysical-proustian trip which teaches us that death is a normal part of life. Another monk exchanges his traditional clothing for jeans and a T-shirt - it’s not known how this scene will be viewed in Thailand, but one thing is for sure: this year’s Cannes Festival was like an open-ended film. You left the venue still wondering how the story ended. Experimental oddity to please Tim Burton’s heart or consolation prize for a country in chaos? Either way, Uncle Boonme is entrancing. Just watch and enter the game, or leave the cinema and go back to a reality you know how to react to. “There might be some mysterious forces waiting to be revealed just as certain things that used to be called black magic have been shown to be scientific facts” says the Director. Dream on, spectator, if you’ve got what it takes.

By Andreea Dobre