NYFF Diaries: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which enchanted Tim Burton's jury to a Palme D'Or win at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is a mystifying and exquisite crowning jewel on Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's young career so far. From the opening long take of a water buffalo immersed in the luscious Thai forests, you get the sense that Weerasethakul's whole world is very much alive. Each leaf in his frame has a liveliness and spirit all its own.

When describing her experience viewing director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first festival sensation, Tropical Malady, Tilda Swinton once said: "I actually remember rubbing my eyes with my fists...convinced, for one split second, that I fallen asleep, that only my unconscious could have come up with such a texture of sensation." Certainly dreamlike, Weerasethakul's sensory cinema is a very pure and transportative one; you feel very much apart of the Thai jungles. You feel yourself in its waters. Trapped in its caves.

We follow Uncle Boonmee in his twilight days with the utmost passion. His wife returns to him and her sister he lives with in the form of a ghost at the dinner table. The way he had missed his beloved wife for so long is heartbreaking to see play out on the screen. His son walks up in the form of some sort of monkey-ghost. Weerasethakul modeled him after the almost campy Thai television of his childhood where these sorts of figures were clearly men in monkey costumes, but it doesn't play nearly as cheaply in appearance or theme. We follow one of Boonmee's recollections as a catfish who had once made love to a human princess. I guarantee you that you will never see such a sequence in film made so naturally, made to seem so ordinary, and so believable. Weerasethakul's ode to Thai folklore never comes across as the least bit absurd or hard to take seriously.

We see Uncle Boonmee predicting a future life in Thailand, shot very reminiscently of La Jetée's nightmarish account of a similar future, ruled by a thought-controlling military and the more fashionable people turning away from the natural life of peace in the forests we have lived with the character throughout the film in favor of a crueler life of modernity in fashion and technology. Once Uncle Boonmee passes, we see a life without him where people are glued to their TV sets and obsessed with counting money.

The film is a floating world of fleeting beauty. A quiet meditation of a land past, present and future. Alive with the sounds of insects, of night, of rustling leaves. The beautiful cinematography can capture the richness of tress, the pristine water or the monotony of manmade walls at any given moment. It's a stunning achievement.

Grade: A+