Uncle Boonmee

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
A Letter To Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)

While this is neither the first, last, nor probably the best or the worst example of this idea, it is AN example, and so I am going to use this film to talk about a broader aspect of filmmaking. It is true that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives occasionally moves at a pace that a snail would laugh at. But what it accomplishes in this slowness is the reclamation, or, at least, reinvigoration, of editing. At one point a cut in a film was a surprise. Eventually, it became the norm, and so now there is a heavy expectation to cut. The audience may find itself bored if there aren't enough cuts. What Uncle Boonmee does is take the idea that the audience can be bored by not enough cutting and use it against itself, making the audience look at a still frame for so long that the viewer's eyes become so accustomed to looking at it that they might begin to think the movie may never cut again. The benefit of this is that when the cut does happen (which is usually not long after, at least to me, I began to feel that feeling), suddenly editing is surprising again and the juxtaposition of images becomes even more pronounced and more affecting. No longer is he simply telling a story through a series of different pictures, but he is actively inviting us to contemplate how the previous picture and the one you're seeing now work together (as well as conflict) with each other. There are very few cuts that I remember specfically in films, but a couple of them are in Uncle Boonmee.

As to the rest, and the reason I put A Letter to Uncle Boonmee as part of the same review, is that I think that short film helps clarify much of what is difficult, at first, to comprehend in the feature film. There are implications of class tensions, and of Thailand's battle against communists during the '70s, and the slaughter that many governmental soldiers carried out. But all these things are implied rather than stated, and much of the viewer's work comes in piecing these hints together to form a coherent vision of familial separation and anxiety and loss. Of the otherness that can sometimes stem between adults and their children as those children also become adults. The divide between generational politics and ideas and the abuse that can stem from failing to recognize the humanity of others. I have not yet seen his other features, but I intend to soon. There is more to write, but I'm not quite sure how to put it in words and I fear that the longer I put off writing this the less satisfied I'll be with the results. It is, so far, my clear winner for the Portland International Film Festival and the best movie I've seen in theatres in the last two years.