Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

(Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives/ Strand Releasing, 2010)

             

            As westerners, we must be careful about foreign imagery. We must be able to separate the exotic from the merely unfamiliar. A shot of sun rays streaming through a tangled jungle scene might fool us in to thinking its exotic, but it’s really just unfamiliar to people who do not live near a jungle. Seeing a ghost appear at a dinner table and stick around for much of the film, on the other hand, blurs the line; we have seen ghosts in plenty of films, but never in such a central, casual, presentation. Is that unfamiliar, exotic, or truly weird?

            Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai filmmaker behind the films Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady, knows the difference and likes it both ways. When a film asks you to identify with a stranded bull in the first scene, you know you are in the territory of general unfamiliarity. This is the prologue to a story, itself blurry and unclassifiable, that encompasses the dying Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), his wife, and his nephew Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) who cares for him. Various friends and family members show up throughout, and it is in the details of these characters that the film goes in to wild. Boonmee’s dead daughter, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) appears as an apparition at dinner, and stays with the family for one last haul. Boonmee’s long lost son turns up, as a half-man, half-monkey, and recounts, over shots of leaping monkeys and fading sunlight, how he mated with a monkey-ghost and ran off with her, turning in to one himself. It is one of the many folkloric segments of the film that also include a princess copulating with a talking catfish and a dream sequence set in the future, shot in still photographs.

(Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives/ Strand Releasing)

These pieces of the film are Weerasethekul working at the level of hypnotism, his strongest ground. He has seemingly adapted the methods of Sergei Paradjanov and Chris Marker, but they were self-conscious and technically obsessed directors. As a director, Weerasethakul is not self-conscious, not quite a surrealist, nor a technician of any sort; he is something like a guider of meditations. As Boonmee and his family stumble through a cave, a flashlight spotting engravings, inlets of water, and bare stones, we might feel like we are falling asleep. But we don’t fall asleep; our eyes stay on the screen, even tighter as the scene shifts back to the sun-spotted jungle. This is the aim of his direction; folkloric hypnotism, relaxing the viewer as a way of gaining their trust. So far, Weerasethakul has been able to make it work in each of his films.

(Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives/ Strand Releasing, 2010)

Most remarkable is that Weerasethakul’s fantastic indulgences are moderated and un-showy. We are never led to believe we are watching anything but a film (this isn’t a real Thai folktale, people), and his characters are people first and symbols later. Their poor French makes their friends laugh; they talk about flirting with girls with their aunts and wartime regrets; they listen to Thai rock music. This is, perhaps, another way in which Weerasethakul gains his audience’s trust, but it also underscores how risky his exotic and unfamiliar imagery has become. A mere walk through a jungle is fascinating to these Anglo-Saxon eyes. Even the Thai alphabet, with its letters that resemble tangles of roots and ancient sketches, is wondrous to glimpse. So if it doesn’t matter which imagery is truly exotic and which is just unfamiliar, if we are entranced by it all, what happens when we get used to it? Weerasethakul has bet the entirety of Uncle Boonmee on this enchantment, and won for now, but had the film been any longer we might have gone from hypnotically sleepy to actually tired. Weerasethakul has to be at least as careful a filmmaker as we must be as viewers, or he might become a has-been of foreign cinema in ten years. It is this creeping suspicion that does not allow Uncle Boonmee to live up to Syndromes and a Century or Tropical Malady (which had a tighter, more disciplined structure). But, largely because of his true foreign-ness, he has earned his title as an astonishing memory creator; one who lets us sort those memories out on our own, trying to make sense of them.

Those memories include a picnic on a farm surrounded by tropical vegetation; that was unfamiliar. A woman sleeping on a bed with a white silk sheet draped over it as the sunlight shines through in pink rays; that was exotic, perhaps too exotic. A man in a monkey suite posing with soldiers in a still photograph, barren plains surrounding them, was unfamiliar. A monk, a girl, and an older woman staring at a T.V screen blasting news of national unease—what was that?

(Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives/ Strand Releasing, 2010)

Lemmy

(Lemmy Kilimister in Lemmy/ Damage Case Films and Distribution)

       

           There are supposed to be more films like Lemmy. That Greg Oliver and Wes Orshoski’s documentary about Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kimilister was never intended to be a cinematic exemplar doesn’t make it any less true. Lemmy is one of the more rugged, giddy and life-affirming films to come along recently, in no small part because its primary subject is a jack-and-coke swilling, tank riding, long-haired, growling metal-head. Yet its more important subject is not taking oneself too seriously, even when one really ought to. The film's narrative hinges on the belief that there is such a thing as  a walking cultural expression and a regular Joe rolled in to one. Which is to say, an unbelievable eccentric, like the rest of us.

         Motorhead was one of the first proper heavy metal bands, coming along in the mid-70’s around the same time as Black Sabbath and shortly after the emergence of punk rock. Kilimister, its founder, came from a fatherless background in England and Wales and was obsessed with classic Rock and Roll from an early age, immediately recognizing the Beatles as the pinnacle of the form. So how to jump from these average-enough roots to a band that epitomizes outrageousness, playing songs with titles like “Killed by Death” as loud and as fast as they deem necessary? By laughing. One of the first concessions Oliver and Orshoski’s film makes is to the utter hilarity of rock and roll in general and metal in particular. Watching Lemmy growl out lyrics about gambling and loose women, lug himself around in black clothes and a cowboy hat, and fail to apologize for a past of drug abuse and philandering is to laugh uncomfortably. Watching him joke around with fellow musicians, gruffly express his love for his son, and show a true English sense of humor-- as he stands beside his tank, in old-fashioned military garb-- is to observe an admirable goofball. Here is a man comfortable in the anti-hip hipness of his chosen profession. He is participating in a film that, with a casual yet specific eye, reveals something about the psychology of Rock music with a vigorousness that rivals This is Spinal Tap.

(Lemmy/Damage Case Films and Distribution)

            The shooting style Oliver and Orshoski adapted is equally vigorous. While interviews with fellow musicians—including Metallica’s James Hetfield and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl—are shot in standard interview form, during the concert footage, guitars wheel through the air, and an audience of lanky, black-clad metalheads scream in our faces, as the camera whips from audience to musicians in an act of frantic engagement. There may not be anything revolutionary about the film’s structure, but there is an untapped well of in-your-face potential in the concert scenes. Even off the stage, one gets the sense of engaging in a performance. This comes across, in particular, as Lemmy shows off his vast blade collection, unsheathing one long dagger, putting it back, then whipping out something even sharper. Or as he mocks other bassist’s playing style before turning up his amp and strumming the bass in his demented guitarist style. The interactivity of the whole project eventually becomes intoxicating, though never overbearing. The film is, like most daring films, a physical experience.

             In one of the most riotous scenes, near the end of the film, Lemmy, restless and a diabetic, paces around his hotel room and pulls a lever on the wall that sets off a musical duck playing a crummy tune about being happy. He stares and stares at it, before walking out the door to play another show. Only after our laughter can we understand how he is simply a rock star, and just another guy who none of us will ever be. He can’t comprehend a cheesy jingle because he is a man who never knew his father, saw friends and lovers die of drug overdoses, and managed to pull through to his 60’s, but at some cost. His film, which, as some footage at the end credits suggests, he was not always comfortable with, transcends the idea of a fan’s tribute in the same way Lemmy himself transcends an outlandish, hard life. A film about a rock star can only get so far before resorting to nonsense about survival and individualism; Lemmy leads us to that point exactly, and ends. Yet all the way through, it plays by the basic notion that people are peculiar and fascinating; so much so, that judgements of good or bad are beside the point. What this same notion might do for Michael Moore’s diatribes and every other feeding-bag of irony and righteousness that passes for documentaries can only be imagined. What it does for Lemmy is create a genuinely felt portrait, amidst all the feedback.

(Lemmy/Damage Case Films and Distribution)

Motion Studies: Across the Tenements

(Robert DeNiro in The Godfather part II/Paramount Pictures)

          The Godfather films are the stylistic apex of a director who had been dead more than twenty years before they were made. D.W Griffith created films with a static camera, characters entering and exiting the tableaus, if they weren’t bursting out of the frames, the camera only moving when people moved. He was the first filmmaker to utilize intercutting in a bombastic form, demanding that his parallel narratives be seen and believed. He moved his camera alongside klansmen on dust-kicking horses and exotic performers in ancient Babylon; he set it steady on a rich businessman drowning in a waterfall of wheat.

            The Godfather films, too, were crafted from a static camera trained on tableaus of characters, colors, objects, and people overflowing from the screen, and a moving camera when someone was on the go. Francis Ford Coppola intercut with tension and  frenzy. Yet the films also had the moral beckoning of Griffith, which—unlike Griffith’s films—was kept at a cool distance.

           Watch, then, as the camera races with Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) across the tenement rooftops of Little Italy, at a crouch. A street fair is taking place below. Watch the cut to Don Fanucci (Gaston Mosich) as he swivels his plump, tuxedoed body away from a display of knights in golden armor, and makes his way back to his apartment. Vito has a pistol in his hand; he leaps down a short stretch of wall, finds the back door of Fanucci’s home, and lets himself in. He wraps his pistol in a white towel; as white as Fanucci’s suit. Fanucci waves to admirers and acts merry; he walks in the door. Vito hides in the darkness of Fanucci’s living room, glancing down the stairs for a moment. Fanucci makes his way up the stairs and opens his front door. Vito steps out of the shadows pointing the toweled gun at his head. Fanucci asks, bewildered, what he’s got there. Vito fires, just as the crowd erupts in applause and fireworks go off. Another shot; the towel blazes with flames in front of Vito’s face; he rips it off. He shoots the dead and bloodied Fanucci in the mouth for good measure. Vito gets out of the building, disassembles the gun, throws the pieces down a chimney and runs back to his family on the stoop of his home. Now watch as he tells his baby boy, in the stasis of Griffith and the moral irony of Coppola, that he loves him very much.

 

The Way Back

(The Way Back/Exclusive Film distribution, 2011)

When Ed Harris tells you never to tell a lie again, you do not tell a lie again; Peter Weir, with his clanging images that include a golden communist archway in the middle of the desert, might take the same advice.