An ox in Thailand is tethered to a tree at dusk while his owners busy themselves elsewhere, but with a degree of force the beast manages to loosen the knot and break free, the rope hanging and dragging on the ground behind him as he wanders off into the jungle. While he is enjoying his taste of freedom, he takes in the fauna around him, but soon his master notices he has gone and follows him, finding him easily and picking up the end of the line to guide him back. Yet there is something in the forest watching: an apeman with glowing red eyes...
Well, that's the way it starts, and after this won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in its year, writer and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul found the profile of his film raised considerably, which proved a double-edged sword. Sure, there were those who were thankful of the publicity bringing this to their attention, but equally there were plenty who resented the time they had spent on it, not understanding even half of what was going on or indeed what the point was supposed to be. The director was not one to easily give up his secrets, which only confounded audiences who couldn't grasp that maybe you were not supposed to "get" the whole thing.
So Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was more of an experience than a linear narrative, and there were clues to that loose approach to the traditional advance of time not being what we were watching. What plot there was illustrated its episodic nature in alighting on separate sequences, some more obviously linked than others, as the story of the end of Boonmee's life was interspersed with other characters, including a Princess of times past who suffers a skin condition that has sapped her confidence, and a monk who is having trouble settling at his new temple who gets a glimpse at a profound split of his life into parallel universes.
Undoubtedly this was a film which meant the most to its creator, but if you were willing to meet him halfway, and you were not familiar with the Thai society and landscape which informed so much of the drama, you might find a pleasingly relaxed mood overtaking you. There was nothing hurried or hectic about what was on offer here, so you were invited to sit back and settle into its easygoing rhythm, meaning that you may not perceive all the things you were guided towards here in the mix up of documentary and more fantastical methods, but you sort of got the idea about a community where the mystical is ever-present, even if it's not quite as overt as what we saw depicted on screen.
Maybe there were people in Thailand who saw monkey spirits in the jungle, but even if they did would they look quite like the apemen we see here, for example? If anything the effect was soothing, as if to prepare the viewer for the inevitable moving from one life to the next as Boonmee sees those people who have died before him re-enter his final days as he got further into accepting that his kidneys were giving up and he was going to meet a lot of those he thought were gone. Although quite why he did so before the final curtain fell was a mystery, but mystery, recapturing that sense of the awe about nature, about existing, was very much to the fore, so that culture of the supernatural intervwoven into the mundane was gently realised. If you spent the whole film wondering why that talking fish was shagging that Princess, then it was safe to say this was not quite the movie for you; if you appreciated it making magical the everyday, you would doubtless enjoy it.
