Past Lives
Enough black pixels and golden fronds have probably been tumbl’d about this movie already, but it’s hard not to want to comment on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
If I were pressed to give a __-meets__ description, I’d go with Lynch-meets-Ozu, for the lighting, and the wide seated shots, and the jumble that nature puts in the frame. Specifically, I’d call out Mulholland and Late Spring. It doesn’t hurt that Auntie Jen’s polio limp mentally matches her to the Twin Peaks midget, either.
I am miserably unequipped to make any good broad comments, but the type of personality, and of family, in the movie seems to match up with the way my SE Asian friends have spoken of their families, or their parents’ generation, all of whom are immigrants. There’s a profound sense of each person being a character in some way, on some level cut off and independent of whoever they’re around, but still affectionate, or at least obliged, to spend time with each other.
This seems different from the family of American TV, or books, where solitude is necessary because being together, and inevitably talking, is an invasion of privacy, an unwelcome mindmeld. The characters in Uncle Boonmee heckle each other, and say deeply personal things, but the statements bounce out without needing confirmation that the statements were heard for their speaker to be done speaking. This is like Lynch’s characters, in some ways, almost druggy in their sidelong conversations, which seems like a dream-interpretation of American talk, but seems natural in Boonmee.
There is nothing stranger to a New England boy than the flat-topped hills of the southern latitudes. I like to imagine that glaciation ground Massachusetts down into its nubby, gravelly form, but my geological education is too shaky to make any real explanations. The difference might just lie in the tropical treeline, mangy-looking compared to the pine-furred ranges west of 128 and north of 90. The rockies are a whole nother thing, where the slope overtakes the forest as the main source of fear.
That strangeness aside, the ambling farm feel is one I half-remember from a visit to a step- or half- or both-uncle’s organic spread near Santa Cruz once as a kid, all redwoods and goats and honey. I had my first buckwheat pancake there, I think, and was shamefully put in my place after teasing my sister for dancing to Elvis in the high-beamed main cabin.
The high beams of the ghosty dinner patio in Boonmee, plus the throb of cicadas (the soundtrack might be the main thing stringing this movie between Late Spring and Lynch for me, low thrums at all times), recalled a night I spent in too-small slippers in a rotted-out ski village in the Japanese mountains, stumbling around half-drunk on rocky paths. There is a connection to be made, at least to start scratching around about what’s up with the military photo montage near the end, to the lost Japanese soldiers in Kafka on the Shore.
Boonmee’s (the character, not the movie) worries about his karma from killing communists gets at something that sets SE Asia apart from its firstier-world viewing audiences, despite all the trappings of gentlemanly rural and 21st-century urban life in the film. Wars have happened there, and in most of the world, within my parents’ lifetime, sparing only, really, Western Europe and the non-African ex-British Empire. A movie about American vets now almost has to be about them being a vet, it’s so marked now as to be the only thing a character can be, not a guy with kidney problems, and a yeti son, and beehives. This creeps into the way TV treated McCain and Kerry, I think. Even without the windsurfing and Wasilla-ite, something freaks us out about people who have shot anyone besides Nazis.
This is one of the few films recently where I’ve found myself grinning for no good reason, excited just to see what was happening on screen, or how the director went about a sequence.
I don’t think the epilogue was meant to say anything about old-meets-new, but that might just be because I hate that shit as a theme. It verges on twee, and, having studied Japanese lit and art, it gets old fast, no matter how true it might be. I prefer to read an unblinkingly syncretic approach to the present. Treating it with irony is too easy by far, something like the social commentary equivalent of a fat joke.
The movie is beautiful, go see it.
