Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Cannes (Official Selection) – Apichatpong Weerasethakul can not only claim to be the director with the most tongue-twisting name in the main competition at Cannes 2010, he also has the movie with the most unusual title and premise. Paul Martin is taken to a place where the human condition is given transcendentally fantastical treatment.

You can say what you like about the paucity of quality in this year's Cannes Official Selection – and as much as I have enjoyed every second of covering the world's most famous film festival, I have been surprised at how lacklustre some of the films scrapping it out for the Palme d'Or have been – but from the moment that the line-up was first announced, and the lamentations began for big name no-shows like The Tree of Life and The Rum Diary, I have been thoroughly looking forward to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, the latest movie from conceptual artist and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

This anticipation did not stem from a pre-existing affection for the Thai movie-maker's cinematic output; though he has an impeccable Cannes pedigree, having won the Un Certain Regard prize for Blissfully Yours in 2002 and the official competition jury prize in 2004 for Tropical Malady, I must confess to not possessing much in the way of prior familiarity with the Apichatpong Weerasethakul oeuvre. No, my eagerness came from a wonderfully original synopsis which indicated that Uncle Boonmee was the tale of a man coming to the end of his corporeal existence, and finding himself visited in his final hours by the ghost of his dead wife and an ape-mutated incarnation of his missing son. Put in conjunction with the head-spinning title, how can anyone not go a bundle and a half on a premise like that?

Of course, the winning name and story outline represent only the most minor of minor victories, as immaterial as a spectral spouse if the movie itself turns out to be cobblers. Happily then, in a Cannes strewn with disappointments, Apichatpong Weerasethakul delivers a film that is both charming and engrossing, albeit in serenely low-key manner.

Set in the north-east of Thailand, the beginning of the movie proper (following an intriguing prologue focusing on a wandering buffalo) finds middle-aged Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and nephew Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) travelling out to that rural region of the country, a million miles removed from the chaotic bustle of Bangkok. Tong and Jen are visiting Uncle Boonmee (played by Thanapat Saisaymar, whose primary occupation is as a construction worker, rather than an actor), a farm-owning relative who is desperately ill with kidney problems.

Having to make do on a restricted diet and endure the daily inconvenience of having various tubes hooked up to his body, Boonmee's health is clearly failing, and he seems destined to shuffle off this mortal coil in the very near future. And though that assessment is very much correct, when the spirit of Boonmee's 19-years-in-her-grave wife Huay (Natthakran Aphaiwonk) appears to them all at the dinner table, and a red-eyed gorilla version of his son Boonsong emerges from the surrounding forest, it becomes apparent that the final hours of this gentle soul are going to be quite remarkable in nature.

While Boonmee is depicted as a normal man in many ways, he is also – as the film's title indicates – in touch with his prior existences (the inference is that the buffalo from the opening scene is one such earlier life), and that this acts to negate the fear and trauma of death for him; the oft-dreaded departure being recast as merely another stage of an eternal journey. There is no suggestion that Boonmee is in any way remarkable, the film instead conveys the notion that all of us, if properly attuned, have access to our full histories on Earth - something underlined by some later scenes involving Tong. How far you can relate to that is a matter of individual sensibility, though like any good filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul manages to communicate his ideas in interesting and engaging fashion, regardless of how easily audiences will swallow them.

There is plenty of humour in the film too, such as Jen's bemused first question to Boonsong on seeing he has morphed into a monkey: “Why did you grow your hair so long?” (he actually looks not unlike a jet-black Chewbacca, but he is often merely glimpsed as a black silhouette, red eyes glowing through the gloom). Not to mention the mini-fable within the main narrative, about a princess getting it on with a magical, talking catfish, which features a curious shot of the water-dweller getting frantically overexcited as it inserts itself up the royal passage. Honestly, it's the dirtiest female-creature relations committed to celluloid since Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast.

One further interesting aspect of this calm, tranquil movie, attractively shot in the northern Thai mountains and forests, is that its blending of fantasy with universal human concerns is perhaps the closest thing I have seen from one of this year's Official Selection to the filmic output of Cannes 2010 head juror Tim Burton. Indeed Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives is not entirely dissimilar from Burton's own Big Fish (though the former is by far the superior picture), and this commonality could make it if not the dark horse for the Palme d'Or, then at least the dark monkey with red eyes.

Rating on a scale of 5 fish fingerings: 4

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Written by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cast: Thanapat Saisaymar, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jenjira Pongpas, Natthakran Aphaiwonk
Rating: TBC
Running time: 113 minutes

And you can read our interview with Uncle Boonmee director Apichatpong Weerasethakul here.