Uncle Boonmee: Cinema at just the Right size

As Americans we're used to thinking in terms of "Larger than Life", especially when it comes to the cinema.  I'm not just referencing the Backstreet Boys movie/song either; currently presiding over the Manhattan Bridge right now are two in-your-face action or bust movie billboards: a new Bond-type thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal (mid-stride, gun-cocked), and a new tweenie fantasy-melodrama called Sucker Punch. 

If however you'd rather tune into your breath than have it taken away, try Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which opened Wednesday at Film Forum.  Like any good meditation session your mind may experience some resistance to the unflinchingly long cuts in many of the film's scenes.  If you can settle into the pace though, there's plenty to be contemplated.  What begins as a benign and mundane depiction of farm life in rural Thailand becomes an incongruous network of unexplainable experiences.  Yet, in no mind rests a view.  When Uncle Boonmee's long lost son suddenly shows up at dinner as a red-eyed ghost monkey, Boonmee's comment is "Why have you let your hair grow so long?"   

Whether it's learning French from immigrant workers or conversing with a catfish, the characters mostly respond with an equanimity that seems to stem from an ethics of accepting wonderment.  Filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul succeeds in depicting a world that is both transformative and realistic, without resorting to magic or fundamentalism.  By constructing the audience's perception around the compositional relation between man and his environment, Weerasethakul frames our sense of events within a scale that may be refreshingly down to earth for many.  His shots are filled with mountains, horizon, and green everywhere; the people are in there too of course, but apportioned in respect to the myriad expression of life.  

Rather than expecting to escape any anxieties by attending this film, I recommend a mindset that you'll be participating in a group contemplation of death and transformation.