Uncle Boonmee

Any film with a long title asks for troubled reactions: it's demanding that its audience do not expect standard cinema experiences. In the same way that Terry Gilliam probably decimated the potential audience for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the critically well-respected director Apichatpong Weerasetha didn't ensure public eagerness for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Maybe it sounds snappier in Thai.

Movie-lovers who sat through any of his previous highly-rated features knew what to expect, and only a sense of duty and masochistic curiosity prompted me to see if Apichatpong (aka "Joe") had developed film-making talent since his low-budget, technically-maladroit and muddled Tropical Malady. That won a jury prize at Cannes in 2004, following a path of glory started at Cannes in 2002 with a top award for Blissfully Yours, leaving few surprised that Boonmee won the Palme D'Or in 2010. Cannes has a special place in the hearts of cinephiles, and often provides warning signs for less sensitive movie buffs.

A grand total of 17 European sources of production funds, plus the Thai government, financed the film, which indicates that Joe and/or his agents have a lot of friends in useful places. They can be commended for enabling Joe to create a technically adroit film this time.

His camera placings may be mostly static, turning scenes into barely moving photographs, but they are in focus and steady. Although he still has a tiring obsession with night filming, using available light in forests or caves, it is now possible to get a vague idea what might be happening or, most of the time, not happening, in non-action slow pans.

Dialogue is sparse, and occasionally risible, as when the red-eyed large monkey ghost of a lost son is asked by his aunt why he grew his hair so long. Plot advances are few and far between, and feature such deliberately bizarre blends of Thai myths and nonsense as an ugly princess transforming herself into a waterfall's beautiful talking catfish.

The nature-loving director's sympathy for the Isaan people of his home province around Khon Kaen is clearly stated again, and a non-Thai might guess that ethnic-Chinese Joe identifies with both the locally distrusted Lao-speaking borderland people and previous communist-inspired uprisings in the area that were crushed by the Thai military (again used as a screenplay motif). This time, though, there's no evident homosexual reference point.

As for Uncle Boonmee, he's a Thai widower farmer dying of a kidney complaint, visited by his living sister-in-law and her children, and the ghosts of his wife and son. The elderly man shares a few memories, is treated by a Lao male nurse, and has a nicely-photographed funeral. That's it, for close to two hours.

The film's most interesting aspect is its nomination as the official Thai entry for the 2010 Oscars: will it be chosen for the long list and short list. Instinct tells me there must be at least six other non-English-language that were better than this one. [It missed the first cut of 9 selections.]