Original: Roger Ebert
April 14, 2011
Perhaps consciousness itself is continuous, sometimes manifested in physical reality. If we pay attention to this, life in the so-called real time and space will fall apart. Wordsworth believed that when we were babies, we carried memories of heaven. As we live and die bit by bit, some tentacles from other times come over to meet us.
This is the possibility assumed by Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2010. Don't be intimidated by its weird name, or see the director's name: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is weird to Westerners. It's just a movie, and he's just a person. If you're open-minded, even fanciful, about the idea of ghosts visiting living people, the film can be a quirky, and more likely, confusing experience.
The second time I watched it, I found that the movie was actually quite easy to understand. For the first time, in the early morning media field in Cannes, I had been expecting it to finally justify a topic. But a dying man like Uncle Boonmee has no plot or action to speak of. In the film, he is on vacation. What happened might seem odd, like a love scene with a catfish, and it was definitely rare. But for a person who is thoroughly familiar with the concept of reincarnation, meeting the soul of a loved one, in any way, should be seen as a good thing.
Uncle Boonmee has been a farmer living in the woods of Thailand all his life. It was not a perfect life as he went through a period of national upheaval and we learn that he witnessed extraordinary suffering. Today, he is dying from kidney failure. A male caregiver from Laos looked after him with several of his relatives. He lives in a house in the forest. He was visited by his dead wife (as beautiful as he was when he died) and his lost son (turned into a red-eyed monster resembling a gorilla). But this is not a ghost story, because when we get to know them, we know they are not ghosts. They are alive like Boomi and have their own consciousness.
One set of shots is fascinating: Boomi visits a cave that seems to symbolize the womb. There are flickering lights and blind fish inside. It is most likely not a real cave. So, if nature and man are one, why can't the earth give birth to man? Or why did Boomi never make such an assumption?
At the end of the film, we can recognize a cautious return to reality. The world of the soul gradually leaves. But when we have the real world, is it also an illusion? At one point, everything in our minds is everything. This is how Uncle Boonmee lived his last life, recalling past lives and lovers with whom he shared them. Simple as that.
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