The day before Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the savvy film-o-centric American web site IndieWire announced that the Thai film was the Competition title rated highest by their panel of professional critics attending the 63rd edition of the festival.
Those festival-goers who were happy that the unconventional tale – in which the ailing title character explores an orchard, a jungle landscape and a cave in the spectral company of ghosts and spirits intimately connected to his most recent earthly incarnation – were deliriously happy.
And festival-goers who wore out their fingers scratching their heads over what sort of twisted taste-makers would willingly encourage a filmmaker to be so obtuse, moaned and groaned aloud. There was gnashing of teeth but no rending of garments.
There's a theory that divided opinion is a good sign.
Certainly there's room for every permutation of cinema, and films such as this (mystical, steeped in ancient traditions, experimental) should unquestionably be shown at festivals and in whatever commercial cinema or cultural centres wish to exhibit them. But giving this film the Golden Palm – in a mostly tepid Competition line-up – suggests it is better than it is.
Uncle Boonmee is suffering with imminent kidney failure. Key figures from his earthly life come to visit – including the wife and son who pre-deceased him. The wife is a ghost but the son has morphed into an apelike entity. Consider "apelike entity" a euphemism for "guy in a cheap gorilla suit with glow-in-the-dark eyes."
The director says he's paying affectionate tribute to the cheap local films of his youth in which creatures lurked in ill-lit corners so the shortcomings in their costumes were less evident.
Boonmee believes he has lived before, perhaps as a water buffalo, perhaps as a plant. Whatever one may think about the transmigration of souls as an ongoing principle of the universe, it provides potentially interesting raw material for a film.
And if you suspect you might come back as a catfish in your next life and want a primer on how to sexually satisfy a princess, this is the can't-miss film of this or any other year.
