Uncle Boonmee

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for this illuminating comment. Your review is better than mine in that a positive response -- and you are of course more open to many of the ideas of the film than I tend to be -- usually leads to better things being said when sympathy is called for, as in this case, to elucidate what the filmmaker is trying to do.

I would not say Thanapat Saisaymar is "an old man," though I cannot find out his age.

The response is another question. I'd say not "very not like" but simply indifferent, because though sometimes impressed at the originality, much of the time I simply don't connect. I said in my festival roundup:

Festivals favor films that set themselves apart from mainstream fare. This means a leaning toward work that is hard to understand, glacially slow, often shot cooly, like Hou Hsiao-hsien's and some other Asian directors', from a certain distance with a stationary camera. There's also a taste for features that merge fiction with documentary elements, especially exotic ones. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes winner, fills the bill. He has every right to go his own way. However when all is said and done he works so far out on the margins that he connects emotionally only occasionally.

A Guardian article datelined Paris says that though Le Monde and L'Express praised the film, many other French critics "turned on" it, delcaring it 'pointless, obscure and excruciatingly boring'. But at the risk of not being very dramatic, I have to acknowledge that this filmmaker establishes his own special mood and has arrestingly strange moments, as well as some beautiful ones. I cannot say "very not like." I can only not say "very like." There is a difference.