Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

A Thai widower dying of kidney failure spends his final days on his farm conversing with his relatives, alive and dead, while considering his past lives.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul , was last year voted winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is based on the true story of a man named Boonmee who told a Buddhist monk that when meditating he could recall his past lives in great detail.

The long (and dialogue-free) opening sequence has a water buffalo wandering off into the forest before cutting to a long scene in a car travelling to Uncle Boonmee’s farm. Mostly filmed in medium to long shots with little or no close-ups the film has the title character’s reflecting on his past, and eager to make peace with it. As such the film is spiritual without being overly religious. Certainly Buddhist concepts such as Karma and reincarnation are discussed by the characters as are the folk beliefs of Thailand but neither is given precedence over the other. Apparent supernatural phenomenon such as the appearance of Boonmee’s dead wife as a transparent ghost are treated as normal by the characters as is the reappearance of his long missing son who returns in non-human form as a monkey spirit.

The acting by the mainly amateur cast is very naturalistic with standout performances by Thanapat Saisaymar as Uncle Boonmee (the calm point around which the other characters orbit) and Jenjira Pongpas as his playful sister-in-law Auntie Jen. The cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Yukontorn Mingmongkon and Charin Pengpanich is almost painterly with beautifully composed shots of the natural world.

David Bordwell, author of The Way Hollywood Tells It, has shown how the likes of Paul Greengrass in the Bourne films and others have reduced the average length of shots in the modern Hollywood film from roughly 10 seconds pre-1960 to an average range of 4-6 seconds with the average shot length (ASL) of the Bourne Ultimatum a dizzying 2 seconds. For the viewer this means a film is edited into a rapid succession of images which are constantly changing thus giving a forward momentum to the film. The detractors of this style say this reflects a culture where concentration is at an all-time low and an audience impatient with anything requiring our full attention.

In contrast to the Bourne Ultimatum’s queasy 2 seconds per shot the ASL of Uncle Boonmee is a stately 34.1. (That’s slow although not quite as slow as Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies which has an ASL of 219 seconds.) For some people the pace of Uncle Boonmee is so slow that we might feel that time has stopped dead in its tracks. There seems to have been a resurgence recently for things like slow cooking as a reaction to the way things are getting ever faster and more frenetic so perhaps a film like Uncle Boonmee is one step in the direction of slow cinema.

The film has little in the way of incident, but you find yourself adapting to its rhythms and getting drawn into its hypnotic pace. It’s refreshing to see this side of a society such as Thailand that we somehow seldom see in the cinema unless it’s used as a touch of “local colour” in a Western blockbuster. It’s sobering to think that had it not won the Palme d’Or what sort of release it would have had in Britain and the United States. We can only wonder what other hidden gems are unseen by the cinema-going public at large because they haven’t won an award or accolade.