Magical reality requires tropical soil, such as Latin America, such as South Asia. Under the tropical depression, the existence of time disappears, the eternal humidity and rainy season isolate the mysterious poetic world, and the ancient nature is still life itself. "Uncle Pommy Who Can Recall His Past Lives" is a melancholy, implicit but bursting and silent image poem, which sings Apichatpong's thoughts and vibrations on life and Thailand's culture and reality in a personal emotion.
The rain in the tropical rain forest is different from other places, more violent and long. Apichatpong did not shoot the boundless monsoon rain, but the drenched humidity permeated every corner of the film. The "Rain" by the Malaysian Chinese writer Huang Jinshu has a similar emotion to "Uncle Bomi". The two rains in South Asia, in Malaysia and Thailand, are the boundary lines, and they also herald unsuspecting changes. Mr. Zhu Tianwen's preface to "Rain" linked Ovid's "Metamorphoses" to it, and it couldn't be more precise: "Metamorphosis, it is rooted in the blurred boundaries of different worlds. Penetration is not class, but a tangle of entanglements where forces collide or cancel each other. It is not systematic structure that dominates Ovid's enthusiasm for writing, but accumulation, enhanced by frequent changes of perspective and rhythm. , scene after scene, event after event, often similar, yet different in the end. Talking makes everything omnipresent and close at hand. It is a poem of swiftness.”
The pool of dreams in past lives is the passage to desire, Pandora's Box. Ghosts and legends are intertwined with reality, imagination tears open the cracks in time and space, and the boundaries between the virtual and the real blur; People think of the primitive and savage love between another bearer and the person in the sedan chair in "The Family of Red Sorghum" in the northeastern township of Gaomi. Such similar emotions can only occur on the hot soil in the hearts of the two authors. The roar of the waterfall is confusing, the reflection in the pool breaks the lock of original sin, the carp spirit seduces the woman, the two different species copulate selflessly in the turbid water, the boundaries are blurred again in the water vapor; the womb-like cave beckons life The stalactites record the deep underground but flowing water all the time, just like the passage of time and life, a glimpse of the future, Bomi dies, the light and shadow draw the Taiji diagram, on the boundary of yin and yang, lie the living and the dead.
The rain and the forest isolate the changes and make the collision more violent, just like the dream of the Lanke people, the illusion of eternity rots the axe, and suddenly time has passed. Uncle Bomi needed kidney dialysis, the sound of water replaced the circulatory system of the human body, and took his life bit by bit in the seemingly normal cycle; the monk took off his robe, and the modern bathing system washed his body, he Put on a denim shirt; the returning souls and prodigal sons, Uncle Pomy's promise to return is the consolation of hope and the melancholy that cannot be escaped. In the constant cycle of cause and effect, the returnees are no longer what they used to be.
The lines are no longer the protagonists of the voice and narrative. All explanations are in the audio-visual. If there is no line in this film, in addition to being more hypnotic and ambiguous, it will be closer to the emotions conveyed by the audio-visual. The audio-visual before and after the change are two half-systems. The natural background sound is both realistic and the rendering of inner feelings; the slow or even non-moving performance of fixed shots and characters renders stagnant time and eternal stillness; the absence of close-ups and close-ups and the extensive use of long-range perspectives erase the characters The emotion, the characters are kept away from the audience, placed between the scenery and nature, and the natural landscape is used to construct a beautiful shot, rendering a calm atmosphere; there are always obstacles in the foreground, which can be dirty car window glass, can be The plants in the rainforest can be smoke or the curtain of the sedan chair, which isolates the world of the film, blocks the audience and the characters, and also gives the picture a depth of field; the editing pace is slow, the long shots are stacked, and the real time allows people to experience the real time. The fictional rainforest world in the film rolls up the same complex emotions; the direction of the light source and the main light source is unique: the top light from a solitary lamp in the dark, the light from the flashlight shaking in the cave; during the day, natural light always shines obliquely on the characters The sides of the characters create a boundary between light and dark, and because the characters are always under the eaves, in the gazebos, and under the shade of trees, there are objects above their heads that separate them from the sky. Entering the cave connects the dream of the future. Change suddenly slams into reality, and nature is about to become a city. The shaking hand-held lens, the dazzling picture of human civilization, the rhythm of cutting and performance is accelerated, and the sound is noisy. At the end of the film, the three figures are like sculptures lying quietly on a bed, in a noisy tavern, the two are relatively silent, it is a combination of slow and fast, a fusion of all changes.
"Uncle Pommy" also has cultural value in the real sense. Protecting the rainforest and reducing deforestation is of course the need of the Thai society facing the problem of exhaustion and environmental protection. Dreams about the future can be understood as concerns about the political forms and commodification bubbles in Thailand and Apichatpong’s concerns about the film art he loves. Power can be a dictatorial voice and a government that cannot represent the people. It is also superficial fast food culture and Materialism is the forced deprivation of deepness and thought. Rulers make things they dislike disappear from the screen by their own will, which has become a reality in some countries, and with such dictatorship and ideological ignorance the longer the time, the less natural eunuchs will find themselves deprived right. These two concerns are dialectically unified, because we can see from the actual practice in some countries that compared with film and television works, the censorship of literature and art is much smaller, because the torrent of kitsch sweeps people's minds, the more people More and more ignoring the connotation of text and pictures, entertainment films are also forced to meet the needs of the market, the quality is worrying, and both creators and audiences are caught in a subjective and objective tragedy.
Combining the data, we can know that Apichatpong, the father of Uncle Bomi, who has kidney disease, has the same disease, and the son who is attracted by the ghost ape is himself. He pursued Western culture and movies, and left his father, who had few days left when he returned. "Uncle Bomi" is also a film flowing with Apichatpong's personal emotions. The isolated life in the rainforest is his guilt for his absence and neglect. Memories of the past that cannot be returned.
Rain represents the sadness and helplessness standing between all the boundaries, just like Borges' "Rain": "The afternoon lighted up again because the rain was falling, suddenly, thinly, or already falling. There is no need to argue. : Rain, only falls yesterday. Whoever hears it falls and recalls a time that has passed The fruit that falls inexplicably shows him a flower called a rose. Its red colour is the bewildering red. It falls until it falls. It blurs all the windowpanes In a forgotten suburb The rain reborn the blackened grapes on the vine branches in some patio that no longer exists A long-awaited voice through the sloping rain is my father. Not dead."
The rain of anxiety, the rain of confusion, is the cessation of all changes and the beginning of all changes. Apichatpong's strong personal sensibilities make this stylized film his outlet and exhortation. I would like to end with a little Malaysian poem loved by Huang Jinshu, the author of "Rain": If you are the wind, if you are the rain, if you are the fire.
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