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How to watch Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2010 · Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch an empty chair fill without any hard cut. (staging)
The dead wife surfaces at the dinner table by slow degrees within one held shot, the film choosing composition over a shock edit to introduce her.
Payoff: You register the impossible the way the family does, gradually, instead of being startled into it. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns). Deleuze calls a moment like this an opsign: nothing to do but look, since seeing it changes nothing that needs to be solved.
Listen for insects and wind instead of any score. (sound)
The nocturnal jungle drone, insects, frogs, wind, does the work a score would usually do, running continuously under scenes with almost no non-diegetic music.
Payoff: The sound field itself starts to feel like another character in the room.
Watch how long the camera holds without moving. (camera)
Mukdeeprom's camera watches rather than chases, sitting in long, frontal, barely mobile takes that let scenes run to their own natural end.
Payoff: The stillness of the camera matches the stillness with which the family accepts what it sees.
Watch the family react to the dead with mild curiosity. (performance)
Boonmee passes the food, Jen studies the returned wife and transformed son the way you would look at a guest who arrived early, no alarm anywhere in the performances.
Payoff: The lack of fear in the actors is what makes the marvel land for you.
Notice how the film digresses into stories that don't connect. (structure)
A talking catfish and a princess, a photographed episode of soldiers and a captured ape creature, arrive as self-contained blocks rather than as scenes building toward a single plot.
Payoff: The film trusts these episodes to sit beside the main story instead of explaining how they fit.
Once you have seen it
Watch the mourners split into two different versions of themselves. (structure)
Near the very end, characters appear to step out of their own bodies, one version staying with the body while another drifts off to a lit karaoke restaurant, with no explanation offered.
Payoff: The film splits into two realities at once instead of choosing which one is true. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). Deleuze calls this a crystal image: the actual and a reflected version fused so tightly you cannot say which one is real.
Notice that the cave never plays like a flashback. (structure)
The catfish, the photographed soldiers, and the cave itself do not sit earlier in Boonmee's timeline, they sit alongside his present as separate layers he can step sideways into.
Payoff: His past lives are treated as available now instead of as events that already finished. In the reading: sheets of past (order of time / coexistence). Deleuze calls this sheets of past: earlier lives coexisting with the present rather than lined up before it in order.
Watch how deliberately old-fashioned Boonsong's monkey ghost costume looks. (setting)
The design leans on the cheap, mid-century look of older Thai monster movies rather than modern effects, an obviously constructed costume standing in the middle of an otherwise naturalistic scene.
Payoff: The film is borrowing from an older way of making images, on purpose, not by accident of budget.
Carry this in: Watch how calmly the family greets whatever walks into the room.
A Deleuzian reading of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives →
How Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was received →