Best Movies of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (อภิชาติพงศ์ วีระเศรษฐกุล) is a Thai independent film director, screenwriter, and film producer. His feature films include Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the prestigious 2010 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or prize; Tropical Malady, which won a Jury Prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival; Blissfully Yours, which won the top prize in the Uncertain Regard program at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, and Syndrome and a Century, which premiered at the 63rd Venice Film Festival and was the first Thai film to be entered in competition there.

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian gave a nice review on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. He said that this beautiful, mysterious and playful film by the Thai director Apitchapong Weerasethakul – winner of Cannes Palme d'Or – is about ghosts, past lives and the fear of death, things that in another sort of movie would be presented as scary or sentimental, but are here accepted as alternative phenomena, existing alongside day-to-day normalities. The poetry is all in this calm and gentle equivalence. The film's sublimely spiritual quality induces a benign narcosis.

The Uncle Boonmee of the title, played by non-professional Thanapat Saisaymar, is a middle-aged man who is terminally ill with acute kidney failure; he has returned to the forests of northeastern Thailand to settle his affairs concerning a modest property he has there. Boonmee is a widower, but has a gentle supportive friendship with his late wife's sister Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) who has come with him, along with cousin Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) and his Laotian medical assistant Jaai (Samud Kugasang).

An evening meal there assumes the character of a Buddhist Last Supper, as the group is visited by the ghost of Boonmee's dead wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), who appears in a fade-in so unassuming, so undramatic, that it hardly feels supernatural at all. But if this was not extraordinary enough, the group has another visitor: a hairy figure with glowing red eyes, looking like Chewbacca from Star Wars. He is in fact Boonmee's long-lost son Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), who has become a monkey spirit. And like Weerasethakul's 2004 film Tropical Malady, the movie makes a vertical leap, straight up, or down, into a separate dimension, here for a scene in which a disfigured Princess has a sexual epiphany with a catfish. It isn't clear which, if any, is Boonmee's past existence: catfish or Princess.

Of course, it is absurd. Laughing at any of it is as easy as setting fire to a ladybird with a magnifying glass. Yet laughing with it isn't exactly right either, because comedy isn't the intention, and neither is whimsy. It is more a wayward kind of poetry, a softly spoken sort of light exuberance which gestures at something very serious. The opening sequence, for example, features not its human cast, but a buffalo that appears to free itself from its tether, wander across an open grassland at dusk and disappear into dense forest from where it is rescued by its keeper. This scene has an almost hallucinatory beauty, accompanied like the rest of the movie by the unceasing, discreet throb of insect life, and all the more affecting because of its simplicity. The buffalo: is it a symbol or an actual spirit? Uncle Boonmee collapses the distinction.

It's the most persuasive and beguiling account of mysticism and religion that I've seen in the cinema recently, or perhaps ever.

The final sequence has a grain of Bergman's Dance of Death, but with acceptance and tranquillity offered in place of severity and fear. It is one of those rare films that contribute to the sum of human happiness: it certainly increased the sum of my happiness. 

Here is an interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He explains about the movie, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

And this is Tropical Malady, the first Thai film to win the highly coveted Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. There are two stories in the film, and was badly received at first. But Quentin Tarantino's high opinion of it changed everyone else's. This movie exists in dual realms, exploring connected themes of love and desire in a radically different way. A fractured love story is interrupted by a feverish night-time odyssey into the heart of the jungle where shape-shifting spirits and tigers abound. The conscious and the subconscious, the modern and the ancient, reality and myth; all become magically entwined in this hypnotic, mysterious drama.