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Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Loong Boonmee raleuk chat” (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) (2010): Layers of freewheeling thoughts that include philosophy, nature, politics, and life’s contradictions, crossing borders of time, life and death, illusion and reality
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is no ordinary movie. It contains a mix of age old wisdom and modern politics, the latter hidden cleverly to avoid the wrath of the Thai censors. It presents Buddhist concepts where the religion exhorts the believer to choose non-violence and abstain from killing living things. In another dimension, the movie is also an ode to nature and the Asian belief in cyclical reincarnation of souls in different life forms over time. In yet another dimension, it is also a film that often connects and refers to a region in Thailand called Nabua that had seen violent rule by Thai armed forces for three decades in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. It is most of all, a modern film that recalls the grammar of a Terrence Mallick film with long segments of silence where the only sounds that punctuate deadpan but ponderous statements are those of insects and birds.
And when statements are spoken in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, they invite you to reflect on its meaning. The lead character Uncle Boonmee is a former farmer, a former soldier, a raconteur, a widower, a father, a brother and an uncle, who knows that he is dying from a kidney disease and that his days are numbered. Lying on a bed in rural Thailand, the old man Boonmee talks of killing larvae pests on a tamarind tree, and shortly afterwards there is a conversation on conserving the life of bees while collecting and consuming the honey. There is a contradiction in attitudes here, to kill living things or no to kill. It is this duality in life the film explores at various stages of the movie. Mallick in his film The Thin Red Line (1998) asked a somewhat related rhetoric question to the viewer: “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” Both films are examples of mature cinema that has transcended conventional box office demands and invites the viewer to a new level of cinematic experience.
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