Alien Wookiee

In popular culture, it’s called the Spirit of the Monkey Ghost—a tall, hairy, lurching beast with electric red eyes—but to Americans it looks just like Chewbacca. Yet Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul identifies with this Asian Wookiee figure. It’s both his alter ego and a symbol of even more ambiguous Thai pop culture recollections in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Named for a dying old man (Thanapat Saisaymar) who says, "My past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me," this reincarnation pageant of obscure encounters and mystical relations is another of Weerasethakul’s art-installations-passing-for-cinema. That

distinction is never clarified; a large part of his acclaim comes from remaining deliberately vague about which aspects of his eulogy/memory constructs are autobiographical, natural, supernatural, past or present.

Weerasethakul gets praise for nontraditional narrative logic—from the opening scene of an ox in the forest being observed by a Monkey Ghost to a family reunion when Auntie Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) visits Uncle Boonmee. In a reunion with the ghost of Boonmee’s wife, he learns the Monkey Ghost stalking his house is the shade of his long-lost son, who had mated with a simian. Later, an exotic detour into ancient times shows how a human love affair leads to a second instance of interspecies intercourse.

Each episode has such faint emotional impact that the narrative lacks spiritual logic. Instead, the dinner-table reunion begins in Third World realism but soon incorporates the otherworldly in such a banal way that it seems almost absurdist, with everyone variously adjusting to bizarreness, like the classroom scenes of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. But even that interpretation reaches for meaning or intent that Weerasethakul won’t divulge— and that fuzziness, not outstanding aesthetics, seems to be the source of his acclaim.

Beware the cognoscenti who condescendingly call Weerasethakul "Joe," the nickname he picked up as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met his Western contacts. His actual name, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is easily pronounced (a-pee-chat-pong weer-rah-set-a-kool) without affectation. But it seems that affectation motivates his supporters. His films don’t convert sophisticates into animists; it’s just that critics who readily abandon or scoff at the expression of Christianity in cinema prefer Weerasethakul’s blandness because it is so spiritually detached. Boonmee’s wife’s ghost informs him that "heaven is overrated," a sentiment that flatters uncommitted skeptics.

Most Western viewers might not quite grasp Uncle Boonmee’s random depiction of reincarnation, and therefore just think it’s Wookiee-ish (as Tim Burton apparently did when chairing last year’s Cannes Festival jury, awarding the film the Palme d’Or). But it’s extremely odd that Weerasethakul himself seems blasé—not amazed—about the central tenet of Buddhism. Despite his reputation as an imagist and fantasy-maker, his methods seem muffled and inchoate. Details of clinical procedure during Uncle Boonmee’s dialysis treatment, performed by a young medic—who is later revealed to be a monk (yet another subplot about a languishing, closeted monk)—lead to metaphysical consequences that are dully relayed. No Buddhist appreciation is felt, nor any sense of the miraculous. Weerasethakul is, in fact, the blandest of visionaries. His picturesque images lack the intensity found in the great folkloric artist-filmmaker Julián Hernández.

The standout sequence resembles Hernández—a fairy-tale divertissement where a pockmarked princess carried through the jungle in a caravan seduces a virile young peon, then reveals selfdoubt and despair when she regards her younger, beautified reflection in a lagoon. ("Deep down I know that reflection is an illusion.") This scene, shot in aquatic monochrome, deals with vague notions of sexual propriety and folk taboo. Maybe it derives from reticent Thai anthropology, but it mostly seems like a leap into artschool conceptualism. Contrasting a pretty boy and hideous older woman recalls the erotic transgression that Weerasethakul featured in Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century, but, again, the meanings are hidden. It doesn’t equal the uncanny seduction in Mizoguchi’s 1953 film Ugetsu, where the farmer tells a seductive ghost: "I never dreamed such wonders existed!" When the comely boy and homely princess kiss in Uncle Boonmee, their iconography intimates gay desire and self-loathing. Unorthodox sex then becomes mythical when the princess converses with a catfish in a lake, asking it to "turn my body pretty and white," and they copulate in the water, like that pool scene in Showgirls.

Sexual mystery goes unexplored— as if Weerasethakul was still at that prepubescent age that is thrilled by Wookiees. He doesn’t have Hernández’s boldness or overflowing sensuality to galvanize the film’s scattered ideas and motifs. Rather than delve into Uncle Boonmee’s soul, or his acceptance of death and transformation, he evokes folklore taboo and the history of Communist oppression. A montage of still photos depicting a history of authoritarian threat

lends specious substance
but has little to do with the characters’ personal lives or their
perception of karma. Weerasethakul’s only confrontation with belief is
Uncle Boonmee’s sense that echoing prayers "are being replayed from my
dying consciousness." His final trip to a cave suggests an earthly
return to the womb— or does it? It could be either a search for the
source of the Wookiee or just another art affectation.

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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
At Film Forum March 2–15
Runtime: 113 min.