The Arkansas Times Film Series returns with a screening of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” the director’s 2010 film which premiered at the Cannes film festival and won the coveted Palme d’Or. We’ll hold the screening at 7 p.m. Tuesday, August 23 at the Riverdale 10 VIP Cinema in conjunction with showtimes of the director’s latest film, “Memoria” which begins screening at Riverdale 10 on Friday, August 26.
While he was born in Bangkok, Thailand, Weerasethakul grew up in a rural part of Isan. His films are explorations of the natural environment that, in many cases, no longer exist. He works outside the strict confines of the Thai studio system — writing, producing, and directing films which often cannot be screened in his home country due to his unwillingness to submit to the country’s censorship board.
A bit about the film: Boonmee, who lives with his sister-in-law Jen and nephew Tong, is suffering from kidney failure. He spends his last days in the countryside with his family who care for him while he struggles to recall his past lives, but as a final act they assist him in his traveling to a remote cave which he believes is the location of his first birth.
That’s all straightforward enough, but along the way he’s visited by the ghost of his wife and his son who has turned into an ape creature after mating with a monkey. Oh, and throughout the film we get glimpses of what we can assume are his past selves. A cow that escapes into the jungle. A catfish that seduces a scarred princess.
From his earliest films, Weerasethakul has always played in the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep. Languid pacing, long shots, and an emphasis on visual actions over dialogue. The director isn’t really concerned with whether or not the audience is able to remain alert though the course of the film and actually encourages viewers to zone out or even nap for a bit if the mood strikes you, the better to let the film seep into your subconscious and allow it to take the form of a dream.
In “Memoria,” his first feature film outside of Thailand, stars Tilda Swinton as Jessica Holland, a Scottish expatriate who’s come to Bogotá to visit her sister. One night while sleeping, she hears a loud boom that wakes her. But is it only in her head? The film centers around her quest to find the source of the sound. At one point she goes to a sound engineer and attempts to recreate it by describing it. But how do you convey a sound?“
There’s a line in the film which — the more I see it — the more I find it resonant. For somebody to say about anything, whether it’s a thought or a belief or experience: “It sounds different in my own head.” That in itself is such an enormous bag of wonder. That we as beings can try and describe things to each other, can try and communicate. But we have to accept that we may ever be able to.
Of Jessica, Swinton says, “She’s not a character. I think of her as a predicament, really … We provide a series of circumstances. She’s a [sic] alien in the sense that she’s an outsider in this country. She also, very importantly, doesn’t speak the language fluently. I find that significant and very fruitful and rich territory. I like the portrait of someone who can’t express themselves with words very well because then it opens up a whole vista of other ways of expressing. With movements, with silence. With the way in which they listen, the way in which they respond. It makes them less active in a way.”
Swinton and Weerasethakul had been trying to find a project to collaborate on for the better part of a decade. “Cemetery of Splendor,” which we screened at the Arkansas Times Film Series in 2019, was initially conceived as a project the pair could collaborate on, but they couldn’t make it make sense. It was only after venturing out from Thailand that they could create something in which they would be on equal footing, both of them strangers outside their home.
“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” screens 7 p.m. Tuesday, August 23 at the Riverdale 10 VIP Cinema.