Nearly every film is pretentious, saying a film is pretentious is stating the obvious.
Boonmee’s life as a kidney cancer sufferer
dialysis...
long-lost son Boonsong (whose fate admittedly provided me with some amusement
Boonsong's metamorphosis into a human-size forest monkey symbolically refers to the insurgent guerrillas of the Thai civil war. I fully understand why Boonsong's physical appearance is amusing (I chuckled too), but instead of thinking to myself, "now that costume is way too campy and junky, director's stupid and the film's ruined), I thought to myself, "I need to stop chuckling and thinking about the costume because Boonsong is about to explain his demise", and through his explanation, I realized that monkey ghosts were more than just an archetypical myth, they had become a social code word for the communist guerrillas (guerrillas: gorillas!). Guerillas - comprising impoverished villagers and other neglected minorities - who kidnapped village boys and young men, forcing them to join the insurgency and fight. Guerillas who also fled into the forests and mountain bases of Thailand when the government soldiers began raping and slaughtering villagers in retaliation against the communist insurgency (Laotian Civil War).
All of these husbands and fathers, brothers and sons, uncles and cousins and nephews, vanishing into the forests and mountains, many never returning. The little boys, enthralled by ghost monkey folk tales, and intuitively making the connection between the ghost monkeys in the forest and their fathers and brothers and grandfathers, et al, lost forever in the forests.
Boonsong the child, lured into the forests by monkey ghost tales, lured by the myth of the "evil" communist insurgents hiding in the forests, perhaps lured by a desire to learn about the people his father killed, people just like his father, Boonsong breaks away and re-discovers and integrates himself into the myths of Thailand's collective past, becoming a guerilla ghost.
Boonsong, and Boonmee, and Weerasethakul, and We The Viewers, moulding our own instinctive responses to external concepts that remain beyond the grasp of logic.
And the amusing costume? It obviously has cultural meaning for Weerasethakul within his own frame of reference otherwise he would not have chosen it ('obviously' because the man is an artist, not a Troma film director), perhaps Weerasethakul's point of the amusing monkey costume being that the 21st century has replaced collective imageries of mythology and folklore (among other things....) that are common to the human spirit and represent the wisdom of mankind (by which mankind has weathered millenia...) with cheap campy creations like Planet of the Apes.
all of whom were bafflingly rapt in concentration
Baffled because people were rapt in concentration in order to hear Boonsong's gently susurrating monologue?! Attacking people for making a concerted effort to hear quietly murmured dialogue.....?!
It was then that I hoped the film would turn around, but they were cruelly dashed with a sequence in a cave
Huh? The cave sequence was towards the end of the film. After the dinner scene is the catfish and the princess scene.
However, when it came to the sequence with the Princess and the Catfish
What? this scene is not after the cave scene, it occurs before the cave scene.
When you think something is incomprehensible, try and understand it, the creator's intellect, and passion, and mystery. To label it incoherent or sloppy or pretentious or amateurish is not only a semantical mistake but an act of intellectual cowardice and intellectual death.
Take whatever you want out of this. Learn whatever you want out of this. Ignore whatever you want out of this. I suspect the response will fall back on a personal attack, so consider this your one chance to extract something of meaning from one of the most brilliant films of 2010 (tied with Film Socialisme and Kosmos) and one of the most important films and filmmakers to grace the world of cinema (as is the criminally ignored Reha Erdem, and of course Jean-Luc G-dard, the directors of the aforementioned films).
And what about nonlinear events and the slowness of time? Like many directors, Weerasethakul kicks linear notions of time and place to the curb, and he merges together formalized film structure with [abstract] Buddhist concepts. Boonmee (and later, Tong as a monk initiate) slipped out of his Self into a thousand different forms. He became everything in his midst, animal, forest, water, quartz, cave, tree, princess, catfish, bugs, and each time he reawakens. Although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always lead him back to his Self. Like Gautama Siddharta, Boonmee remembered his former lives and possessed great wisdom and emptied himself of his hungers, desires, dreams, pleasures, sorrows, finally attaining Nirvana, no longer plunging into the troubled stream of forms. But Tong, will that be his fate? Tong simultaneously walking out of the hotel room to satisfy the illusions of his senses while remaining within the room, eyes glued to the television set to satisfy the illusions of his senses, committing both actions at the same time: trapped in the cycle to satisfy hunger, desires, dreams, pleasure, sorrows, etc, and while trapped, becoming spiritually empty, the illusions of the senses vanquishing his spirit, something that is happening to all of humankind, something that Weerasethakul is lamenting, the Boonmees have rapidly becoming a myth while the Tongs have rapidly become the reality. And simultaneously walking out of the hotel room while remaining within it: we are neither here nor there and we are everywhere and nowhere. Our thought processes, our myths and philosophies and religions and values, everything that humankind needs to heal itself and re-connect itself to the cosmos (represented by Boonmee's end-of-life journey...) are all things that defy and shatter linear form and logic, and they are under direct attack from the linear logic of the sterile technological, industrial, materialistic, capitalistic age (represented by the life Jen leads, and the life Tong is choosing) that we currently live in.
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CitrusWithFuschiaTrim
13 years ago
Whoa. Now there's some food for thought.
And it looks like I'll be tracking down this Kosmos film as well.
_____
I suppose on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here.
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projectmolcos
13 years ago
Hi there
Thanks for the mail, but you thought wrong. Personal attacks are not my stock-in-trade, unless the OP makes it so. I would like to reply to your mail but, before I do and hope you don’t mind me asking, would you tell me if you come from Thailand or have strong personal links there? I’d be grateful for knowing this before I reply.
Cheers and best regards.
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TemporaryOne-1
13 years ago
Reply exactly how you want, without restraint.
The reply is for all readers, and has the potential to delight or offend anyone reading.
Articulate anything and everything you want to articulate.
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dyahrmarkt
13 years ago
@project - here's a thread I just started for the film, as an expat living in Thailand. To know a little bit about how the Thais handle everyday notions of ghosts, potential magic, and the assumed reality of reincarnation will help in understanding the film more -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588895/board/nest/184207339
Please nest your IMDB page, so you respond to the correct person.
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xterminal
13 years ago
<i>Guerillas - comprising impoverished villagers and other neglected minorities - who kidnapped village boys and young men, forcing them to join the insurgency and fight.</i>
Thank you. I think you just gave me the clue I needed as to why AW recast Sakda Kaewbuadee from <i>Sud Pralad</i> with the same character name. That (along with trying to puzzle out the final sequence) was one of the questions I wanted to get an answer to before reviewing it...
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