Author: Roger Ebert Published: April 14, 2011 Translator: Vigilius Score: ★★★☆ (Four stars are full marks)
Maybe our consciousness is always there and occasionally emerges in the physical world. If we were aware of this, we would not be able to concentrate on living in real time and space; Wordsworth believed that we have memories of heaven as infants. Maybe in the future, if we live well, as we get closer to death, tendrils from the other side will stretch out to greet us.
That's the possibility raised by Uncle Boon Mi, Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Don't be intimidated by its whimsical title or the director's name, as the name Apichatpong Weerasethakul would look odd to Westerners. It's just a movie and he's just a person. If you're open to, or even fantasized about, the idea of ghosts visiting living people, the film is likely to be a strange and confusing experience.
I found this movie in my second swipe to be easy to understand. The first time I saw it was at the Cannes show, and I was expecting it to make some point. But a dying man like Bun Mi doesn't have much plot and no action plan. He is saying goodbye. What happens in the movie may seem strange; for example, the love scene with Catfish. But for people who are used to reincarnation, it must be a good thing to meet the souls they have loved, no matter what they are now.
Uncle Boon Mi spent his entire life working as a farmer in a forested area in Thailand. This is not a perfect life. His country went through upheaval in his lifetime, and we guess he saw more than he imagined. Now he is dying from kidney failure and is being cared for by a male nurse from Laos and several of his family members. He lives in a house in the jungle that blends into nature and is visited by ghosts at the dinner table, including his dead wife (as beautiful as he had met her) and his son (looks like he paid a premium for a reddish Orangutan suit with electronic eyes). But this is not a ghost story, because these are not ghosts as we understand them. They are alive and conscious like Wenmi.
There are sequences of segments that might appeal to you. Bun Mi visited a cave that seemed to represent the womb. With twinkling lights and blind fish inside, it may not be an absolutely real cave. Well, if nature and human beings are one and connected, why can't the earth be fertile? In other words, why didn't Wenmi not think like this anyway?
As we've come to realize, the film returns to reality with restraint at the end. The spiritual world is gone. But when we have fantasies and hallucinations, is the real world more important than them? At any given moment, all that is in our minds is all that is happening. This is how Uncle Boonmi spent the last days of his life and how he remembered his past lives and those who lived with him. It's that simple.
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