MovieChat Forums > Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (2010) Discussion > Significance of the monk scene in the en...

Significance of the monk scene in the end (spoilers)


Can anyone interpret the significance of the final scene with the monk at the end of the film? Was the monk one of Boonmee's reincarnations as well?

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The monk wasn't Boonmee, it was Tong. He looked kinda different with a bald head, but Aunt Jen addresses him as "Tong" in the hotel room.

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Er...
Look, I was late for the show, and in the end, my handbag fells on the floor. When I look up, I see the end credits.
So I'm not sure about the end... but I surmize that there is a connection between Tong and Boonmee. If not, why the frozing effect ?

emm
"to tax and to please, no more to love and to be wise, is not given to men"

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In Thailand all young men have to spend some time in a buddhist monastery...it's part of their tradition. As you can see though, they no longer take it very serious at all...which maybe ties in with the loss of the 'old world' and it's familiar spirits (friends), and the 'new world' with its impersonal - banal, tv obsessed society. Their lives in the 'farm' seemed much more 'rich' in contrast to that of the city.

I don't know, I found the film too boring, but that's what I got out of it.

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That's what I took away from the ending as well... and it was slow, but thought it was worth it.

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I think it's an allegory of "Death as the transmigration of soul"
you see, the scene show the guy stop becoming something (a monk) to become something else (a normal man). It's the same as you stop living this live and continue to live in the next live (at least from the directer point of view).

but if you talking about the scene where he saw the other self continue to watching TV, I guess the directer want to demonstrates an unknown nature of reality itself (as in String Theory, where the reality may have multiple parts like algorithm).

anyway, it's just my opinion. anybody can have their own theory about it.

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Eloquently expressed, wasan_s2000.

I interpret the ending to be the transmigration of evolution into devolution, and existence into nonexistence.

The transmigration of imagination into machination. Of soul into spiritual void. Of myth into impossibility. Of humankind's primitive intuitive connection to the natural landscape of the earth into industrialization and destruction (war). Of passion (Boonmee and Huay) into homoeroticism and autoeroticism ([Brother] Tong in shower). The journey into the cave (enlightenment, spiritual world) transmigrated into the journey of the artificiality of life. Ancestry and history and heritage into pop-culture and materialism. Of individuality into roboticism/conformity. Of existence, into nonexistence.

And of the mythical-naturalistic-magical world of Boonmee into the calculating-materialistic-mundane world of the everyday. Man shakes off the robes of ancient spirits and imagination and memory and re-enters the daily routine. The breathing trees and chirping crickets and lapping water and scintillating quartz and murmuring night transform into the buzz of electrical lights and television reports and metallic beats of artificial music.

The cinematic journey is over and the cold hard reality of the world seeps back in.

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Hmm...the constant presence of alternate realities, with this consciousness as one track, maybe the consciously chosen track, whatever...

It's as good as anybody else's ideas on the end of the film, as far as I'm concerned.

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If the film is viewed as a journey through Thailand's stages of transformation, and, more importantly, humankind's stages of transformation, then the last scene ushers in the age of Thailand/humankind as a materialistic modern society lacking authentic culture.

The film Creationistically opens with a jungle pregnant with seed-bearing plants to sustain life, a primitive buffalo in the jungle under the stewardship of man, the same primitive buffalo escaped but with a broken lost spirit and easily re-enslaved (all the beasts and seed-bearing plant on the face of the earth given to man...) a riverrun drive through a burgeoning junglescape melds into a sedate edenic taramind plantation where Boonmee dwells, a dying man who summons up the animals and spirits of his and Thailand's past in order to make peace with things nearly vanished in time, things that he perhaps wanted with him as he exited his current stage of earthly existence.

His memories are what literally follow creation, memories comprising the history of mankind - wife, procreation, a lost son marked for life, mythologies created to articulate the pain of existence, war, killing, families torn apart. He's tasted and relished the sweetness and bitterness of the earth, he's given a blessing to his sister-in-law (the farm, which she may or may not have accepted: spurning the blessing of a country life in favour of material life in city), he's repented and lamented and waxed nostalghic and descended into a dazzlingly spangled quartz cavern that carries him home.

Will what he cherished most, nature, family, mythology, authentic cultural identity, the sedate rhythms of life, vanish with him?

The documentary-style of the monk scene in which Tong can't wait to shed his robes and eat fast food and laments about how the other monks have computer access and he's not allowed to have a radio, tells us, yes.

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[deleted]

very profound analysis indeed.


I may add that in the end - it was no matter whether they continue to watch tv or go to eat in karaoke bar - both decisions were equally useless :) Moreover - where is the remission from the end of "Syndromes and a century" ;)

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"Of passion (Boonmee and Huay) into homoeroticism and autoeroticism ([Brother] Tong in shower)."

I think you are alone in that interpretation, my friend.

----------------------------
www.ontape.blogspot.com

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Yes, I'd have to agree. I thought the reason Weerasethakul shot Tong's uneasy entrance into the apartment and his shower in real time was to dwell on how easily the religious life can be shed and the nature of a 'normal' young Thai man appear. Notice how he couldn't be near the women when he was wearing his robe but a shower and jeans and t-shirt can make him be treated 'normally'.
Thanks so much for this discussion everyone. It's illuminated my experience of this film a lot.

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Makes a lot of sense. Points to the arbitrary, almost garishly shallow nature of this kind of religion, as compared to the genuinely felt religion of Boonmee earlier in the film, in the natural (and naturally-lit) settings.

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@jpotter -

Hear, hear....I agree there. There is positively nothing "autoerotic" about taking a shower. At least, not in this film!

I'll give it up for the catfish scene (weirdly erotic, indeed).....but the shower? Errr....

Please nest your IMDB page, so you respond to the correct person.

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To expand on the last scene, not only was Tong willing to trade in his vows for a quick meal and a hot shower, there was also: counting the funeral money at the end, choosing only to buy a funeral book if Boonmee left them a lot of money, Jen saying "we weren't that close anyway", etc. And the prolonged shot of the three sitting on the bed watching television, not saying anything to each other. All quite the opposite of life on Boonmee's farm.

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Yeah, I mostly agree. I didn't think this was a great film (although it is at times very significant and very beautiful), but there is no question in my mind that the value of the film increases very much in those final scenes, with the jarring quality of those scenes under the depressing artificial light and shallowness of culture, in comparison with where we were earlier in the film. There is certainly a sense of loss and of something "vanishing" with Boonmee, as you say. I hadn't thought of it as a kind of allegory to the nation as a whole, but I wonder now if that wasn't the point -- although I confess I haven't read or listened to any interviews with the writer/director, etc., so maybe this has been covered already.

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