Uncle Boonmee (Thganapat Saisaymar) has lived in the country and off
the land for all of his life, has pretty much become one with the country,
but now he suffers from kidney problems and knows he will die soon, and
his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and her son Tong (Sakda
Kaewbuadee) have come from the dity to take care of him in his last days.
But he's also visited mby his wife Huay (Nattakarn Aphaiwonk), who has
died 19 years ago but now comes for a visit as if it was the most natural
thing on earth, and his son Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), who has
disappeared 13 years ago but now comes back as half-human, half ape.
Especially Huay helps Boonmee to make his transition from living to dead
as easy as humanly possible, by filling his last days with love and some
weird magic, and by taking him to a cave to die where he has been born in
in a former life. When Boonmee is gone, Jen and Pong return to the city to
their creature comforts like television and karaoke bars, but the magic of
Boonmee's last days is all gone ... or indeed is it? At its
best moments, this film is simply wonderful, as it is great in translating
the magic of the script to the screen, with only very limited special
effects but wonderful and wonderfully atmospheric images, and in its best
moments, the intentionally slow pacing and the many long and rather static
camera setups really carry the story. Unfortunately though, the film is
not only made of good moments, and at other times it seems just painfully
slow, even dull, plus it suffers from quite a few shortcomings of the
world cinema genre, like its over-emphasis on its lead character's
one-ness with nature, its celebration of the simple life, and quite a few
over-long depictions of folklore and rural traditions that do not only do
nothing to advance the story, they actually destroy the film's pacing. All
that said, Uncle Boonmee who can Recall his Past Lives is still a
rather sweet (if a bit too long) movie - though to be quite honest, I fail
to understand why it has earned the Palme d'Or of the 2010
Cannes Film Festival.
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