It’s a Different World

When the jury of the 2010 Cannes
Festival bestowed the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, upon Apichatpong Weerasethakul
for his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the filmmaker
was just as shocked as the audience. Gliding onto the stage to accept the
award, endearingly nervous and dressed in his white suit jacket amid hollers
from his fans in the back rows, the director whispered what may be the most
direct description of the winning film: “This is like another world for me.”

Uncle Boonmee is a mind-altering tale of spirits
past and present, where memories in various forms—personal, political,
cinematic—meld into a fascinating kaleidoscopic dream. The film’s hazy logic
somehow makes sense: At a gathering for Uncle Boonmee, soon to pass away from a
kidney disease, deceased family members reappear at dinner, often abruptly,
sometimes in the form of a monkey resembling a Bigfoot-type monster with
glowing red eyes. A digression from the main narrative strand becomes a parable
featuring a princess and a talking catfish. An ending that suggests a rupture
in the fabric that the audience may not have noticed, may surprise as much as
confuse audiences. Uncle Boonmee asks us to follow along on its wave of
ambivalence, and we happily oblige.

“[Boonmee]
started with the art project called Primitive, a survey of the Northeast
of Thailand where I grew up,” Weerasethakul says. He typically introduces
himself as “Joe” to save Western journalists and fans from the embarrassment of
mispronouncing his name (a-pee-chat-pong weer-rah-set-a-kool). “The film’s focus is inspired by a book from the temple
near my home, and it’s about this guy who could recall his many lives. For me,
I’m interested in how we remember. So this guy is a super computer, you know.”

The film is filled with personal
memories in the form of references—to old-style television dramas, radio plays
and comic books—in Thailand. The lighting of specific scenes, especially early
in the film, is meant to evoke the low-tech studio techniques of the Thai
television Weerasethakul grew up watching. While Boonmee is often
ambiguous, most critics have referred to the film as the director’s most
accessible work to date because of its relatively straight narrative lines.

“I don’t think I know what is
accessible. I don’t have the same impression as the audience when I write it,”
Weerasethakul explains. “I tried to make a hybrid kind of creature. In the
film, when I wrote the dinner scene, even though I know it’s kind of funny, the
dialogue and the reaction to the ghost, at the same time it has this feeling of
sadness. In Thailand, someone said they cry at that scene, and someone said they
laugh at that same scene.”

Weerasethakul’s moving image work
combines the personal and mythic in truly unique ways, traversing standard
genre boarders and blurring lines between experimental and narrative cinema,
the art house and the gallery. His first feature, Mysterious Object at Noon,
blends documentary realism with surrealist games. Blissfully Yours and Tropical
Malady, which both won prizes at Cannes, mix subtle eroticism, folk tales
and a political fog that lingers in the ominous dark jungle. The Primitive
project, an installation consisting of videos and other works and the most
recent in a long line of short video projects, will have its North American
premiere in New York at the New Museum this May.

“The feature film and the
installation, the shared element is the memory of the place. Physically,
narratively, they are so different,” Weerasethakul says. “So for the
installation, it was just the people who tried to forget all this brutality
that they have in one lifetime. But for the feature film, it’s a guy who
remembers so much—and wants to remember before he’s gone.”

The brutality and sense of dread
central to both Primitive and Uncle
Boonmee is local and
extremely personal. In Spring 2010, long-simmering tensions erupted in Thailand
between “red shirts” and “yellow shirts”—or to put it more succinctly, rural
and urban—over alliances to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The
clashes almost kept Weerasethakul from attending the Cannes premiere. In Uncle
Boonmee, these tensions are evocatively recalled in a remarkable sequence
of still images, culled from the Primitive project, in which image and
sound fully reveal their avant-garde influences.

Weerasethakul studied film at The Art
Institute of Chicago (where he gained that “Joe” moniker), and its curriculum
of experimental cinema left an undeniable impression. “The core of it is about
freedom,” Weerasethakul says. “You can make the film by yourself. I tried to do
that in Thailand, but it’s impossible. We don’t have the supporting system for 16mm
and printing. So I gradually adapted, in a way. But what sticks on is that the
film can be very personal.”

The road toward adapting has not been
an easy one. Weerasethakul ran into problems in Thailand when the state
proposed cuts to his previous film, Syndromes
and a Century. The filmmaker refused, and in protest created the Free Thai
Cinema Movement. This, along with his outspoken views in favor of the
anti-government protesters, left Thailand’s reception of Uncle Boonmee
in jeopardy. So far, it has been a success.

“I’m surprised [at the success],”
Weerasethakul explains. “With my past film’s reception, I decided to release it
in one theater. It did so well. I think it’s the best-received film of mine.
With that print we have toured other cities in Thailand. The DVD hasn’t come
out yet, but there are a lot of pirate ones going out in the market.” He
punctuates that statement, like many others, with a cheerful laugh.

Weerasethakul is currently working on
a project that will return to familiar landscapes, focusing on the Mekong River
in the area where it separates Thailand and Laos. This is distinct from his
long-gestating Utopia, a science fiction project about the death of what
we know as science fiction. The director doesn’t think it will ever be produced.
“It’s maybe impossible,” he says. “It’s too expensive.”

Uncle Boonmee feels like a touchstone—for world
cinema and the rest of Weerasethakul’s career—since its resonances and
reverberations are deeply felt. “I cannot shake the childhood memories,” the filmmaker
says. “When I write, it’s always going back to that time. The feelings, and the
fear, of darkness. Those unknown territories.”

Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives screens at Film Forum through March
15.