Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

The incredible lightness of buffalo.

From the first scene, this film is possessed by a lightness, the lightness in the earth. A water-buffalo, sleek, sentient and beautiful in the moony twilight that suffuses the greater part of this film sniffs the air, lows and whinnies, breaks from its hitch, and trots into the Thai jungle alive with the whirr and click of invisible insects. It moons and munches in the undegrowth until its human keeper, a figure at home in but not precisely of this realm of megafauna and dense and sleeping vegetable life, calmly summons it forth. There is no urgency of motivation for this beast's escape, nor in its return to the fold, just an everpresence that compels, an immanence that steadily breathes and animates each and every floating moment. This scene is quietly breathtaking and it sets the tone for the gorgeous, ghostly celebration in slow cinema that is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Folds in time: ghostly presences.

Uncle Boonmee is a kindly widowed farmer of tamarinds and honey, who's seen some time in the Thai military in action against the Communists, and now, suffering from a slowly debilitating kidney disease, has begun to see time in a whole new way. Though Buddhism and the Buddhist way of life inflects this film, it is not so much a case of Boonmee recalling his past lives as a kind of record recited, but rather an expression of the way that lives, of others, of dreams, always already in the past, are recalled by consisting in the presently lived. Boonmee's wife manifests at the dinner table – the shock to his visiting sister-in-law and nephew is only momentary, Boonmee unflappable – saying that she doesn't experience human time anymore. She becomes a part of the palliative cohort Boonmee gathers around himself – family, his mostly illegal immigrant Lao farmhands and personal carer – but of course, she has never left. When he asks her where his spirit should look for her when he dies, she answers "ghosts do not attach themselves to places, they attach themselves to people."

Even more surprising is the appearance of Boonmee's sister-in-law's son, who disappeared years ago. He returns as one of the glowing red-eyed simian forms that haunt the margins of the film, at the edge of the human realm, stepping into the moth-harried lamplight at the dinner table in all his Wookie glory. He relates his obsessesion with taking photographs as a boy, until one day he sees a blurry figure in a snap and sets out to find the animal. It turns out to be a Money Ghosts with whom he runs away with, leaving the human realm for a twilit existence. This story is one of many haunting episodes in the film that don't have an obvious connection to the whole – but this is a relief. Without searching anxiously for a coherent map of this suspended collection of narrative soap-bubbles, you always feel fantastically privy to the firelit clearing at the heart of the movie, at the heart of which is love, compassion, and companionship, a light that extends out into the inhuman world of the jungle and the timeless stones but whose horizon is not visible, or obvious, to human eyes. By what I suspect is a thoroughgoing use of shooting day-for-night, the film, like a dream, moves beyond the visible to the sensuous; primary is feeling, and tone.

Our animal selves in other realms.

In the weightlessness of the film, its buoyancy and oneiric alignment of the human and spirit worlds, is a concern with time, lived time, and the recollection of time, as the title might suggest. The idea that the past, past lives, are all present is one such indication of this concern. I also feel that there is an acute concern with the way cinema can spatialise time, can map the presence of time. There's a curious episode that Boonmee narrates while he (of course locating him temporally like this is a difficult to avoid side-effect of descriptive language) is released from life deep in a cave, whose crystalline formations and strata are geology's diagrams of time, a time beyond any humanly phenomenal dimension. He talks of a dream in which he was (again, undesirable temporal positioning) a time-traveller to a future where the authorities have a beam that seeks out past-people, projecting them onto a wall and in doing so revealing them. This cannot avoid comparison to the cinematic apparatus, if only in that it literally projects events that have unfolded and been inscribed in a past-time. While Boonmee narrates, a series of 'stills' (static shots that have been rephotographed by the film camera, that is) depict a group of military and young men interacting with (guiding by a leash, posing for the camera with) patently ape-suit wearing figures. This depiction could be pinned down to an illustration of Boonmee's dream: a future society, and the ape-figures as the past-people, perhaps a visual echo of the monkey ghosts of the other episode. It also resonates with the film's subtle undercurrent of contemporary S E Asian politics and history: illegal immigration, ideological wars in Indochina, guerilla groups (seriously now): an undercurrent that goes some way to anchoring the film in a narrative stream that is not entirely that of dream or the floating, unengaged world.

At the same time, there is an unbroachable disjuncture between the linguistic device of voiceover narration and the succession of static shots, a juxtaposition that recalls Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962).  The suggestion is that we live a dream, and that images and stories are the way our lives, present and past, are preserved, recalled, lived again (the ghost at the dinner table pores over a photo album at one point); the ineffability of our lives and what lies beyond life, and the ineluctability of our engagement with life by way of stories and images, not to mention the ineluctable transformation or negation of life that is death. 

After Boonmee's death and funeral, this is enacted in an even more direct fashion when sister-in-law, daughter, and the family friend monk drag themselves away for dinner and karaoke from the soap-opera in their hotel room only to react, however mildly, to the sight of doubles of themselves remaining passive in front of the telly. Visually, it is a literal (temporal/spatiovisual) bifurcation that seems to replicate the cyclic, resurgent temporality that subtends dream and experience, that is the substance and lifeblood of this singularly beautiful, meditative piece of celluloid. I sat engrossed in a fold in time for its entire length, knowing this was a singular film well-deserving of its Palme d'Or at Cannes 2010.