When Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, those of us at home who'd been following the young Thai filmmaker's career were thrilled -- and puzzled. The new movie, we'd heard, featured talking monkey ghosts and a catfish skilled in the art of cunnilingus -- in other words, it sounded pretty much like business as usual for the adamantly nonlinear filmmaker known more commonly as Joe, and I, for one, couldn't wait to see it. But it certainly didn't sound like a predictable choice for one of the most prestigious film prizes in the world, and it meant that Joe's rapturously twinkling little star was ready to shine brighter outside the relatively cloistered world of film nuts. Joe's work was poised to reach a broader audience, God help them.
I say that only because every time I've written about Joe's movies, I've received angry e-mails and comments from people who declare them the most boring movies on the planet, or the stupidest, or something. But I won't apologize for their so-called strangeness: That only does them a disservice -- they're supposed to be mystifying and a little unsettling. Evocative rather than diagrammatic, they're not the sort of thing you can dissect with a catchy, hit-getting "Everything You Need to Know About..." explainer piece. Besides, I'm not sure pictures like Joe's Tropical Malady (2004) or Syndromes and a Century (2006) are any more bizarre than, say, most of David Lynch's more out-there movies (or even his more in-there ones). If anything, Joe's sense of dream logic is more naturalistic than Lynch's, more grounded in the knowable world -- as much, that is, as we can know about nature -- and the luminous Uncle Boonmee is no exception.
There really is an Uncle Boonmee in Uncle Boonmee (played by Thanapat Saisaymar): He lives in the country, where he oversees a large orchard, and he's suffering from an ailment that is causing his kidneys to fail. Boonmee's nephew Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee, who played a character of the same name in Tropical Malady, and who also played a monk in Syndromes and a Century) and his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) have come to visit him. As they sit around an outdoor table in the evening, shooting the breeze and catching up on news, a shimmering presence gradually takes shape in one of the empty chairs. It's Uncle Boonmee's wife -- Jen's sister -- who died some years before. The group around the table are surprised to see her, but only mildly so. After a few minutes they become accustomed to her presence, as if she were a neighbor who'd stopped by unannounced but whose company wasn't unwelcome.
And really, the woman's presence is hardly weird at all compared with the next guest: A monkey spirit with glowing red eyes, who explains in vague, dreamy detail how he came to live inside his current furry form. All of this follows the movie's opening sequence, in which a cow stands listlessly among a stand of trees in a misty twilight. Egged on, perhaps, by the half-urgent, half-soothing chirping of crickets and cicadas, he eventually breaks his tether and runs off, with school's-out-forever abandon. His confused run at freedom is short-lived: He's reclaimed and becalmed by a man who seemingly emerges from nowhere, as a silent group of red-eyed monkey ghosts looks on.
That cow may be a previous incarnation of Uncle Boonmee, a half-glimpsed memory from a very different life. Or it could be just a cow, because in a Joe movie, being "just a cow" is certainly enough. Anyone who has seen any of Joe's previous pictures -- Tropical Malady, with its talking tiger spirit; Syndromes and a Century, a love story that takes place wholly before the lovers even get together -- probably knows that connecting the dots of Uncle Boonmee, in any strict way, is futile. But there is a story here, albeit one that takes shape from the mist the movie leaves in its wake. The experience of watching a Joe movie -- of bearing witness to the cool, frondy forests and light-streaked skies that recur in his movie's landscapes, of slipping into the way his characters live so intensely but un-self-consciously in the present -- accounts for only half the experience of actually seeing it. There is the Joe movie that you watch, and the one that follows you home afterward: One is a ghost of the other, but it's hard to tell which is which.
That's why I find Joe's movies to be magic: They're oblique and concrete at once, gorgeous to look at, and dappled with jokes that connect the real world with the dream one (like the way Jen asks the monkey ghost, with a faint air of motherly disapproval, "Why did you grow your hair so long?"). Uncle Boonmee was shot by two cinematographers, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Joe's regular collaborator) and Yukontorn Mingmongkon, who don't so much capture the stillness of the countryside as pick up on its every minute vibration. Their compositions are restrained but never static: During that dinner-table ghost visitation, a lantern glows nearby like a facsimile moon, a reminder, perhaps, not to take the natural world at face value.
I'm sure that someone with a better knowledge of Thai folklore could illuminate some of the deeper meanings of Uncle Boonmee. But as with any Joe movie, the key is to let yourself go with the meandering current of its narrative. In one of the movie's most beautiful sequences, a not-so-pretty princess looks at her reflection in a pond, her unhappiness clouding around her like an oppressive mantle. Suddenly, a catfish speaks up from over yonder, assuring her that her true beauty sets her leagues apart from other women. Grateful for the fish's kindness, she tosses her jewels into the water as an offering, and then, lying back on a pillow of gentle waves, she offers him yet more.
The sequence is so smoothly orchestrated that it hardly feels over the top. And yet Joe knows it's a little funny, too: You might find yourself giggling at it, and that's perfectly OK. The surest way to misunderstand any of Joe's movies, Uncle Boonmee included, is to take them too seriously, to approach them with too much film-studies-major rigidity. Joe's movies can certainly be baffling: I'm still trying to parse the possible meaning of the final section of Uncle Boonmee, in which Tong has become a monk -- perhaps the same monk we met in Syndromes and a Century, at another time, or in another lifetime? But the biggest, most joyful mystery of Joe's movies is the way, strange as they may be, they always feel so wholly at home in the world. One of the ghosts of Uncle Boonmee, upon hearing how the people she left behind had mourned her, reassures them: "I could feel your prayers." With a simple line, and a powdery, phosphorescent image, Joe builds a bridge between the dead, the living, and the always-shall-be. It's the music of being everywhere and nowhere at once.