ONCLE BOONMEE, CELUI QUI SE SOUVIENT DE SES VIES ANTERIEURES

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
“The one thing that makes Oncle Boonmee so special is that its sense of miscellanies and reboots serves a game of echoes between the near and the far, the intimate and the public, secret whispers and the rumour of the world. For these sensual devices to prove efficient, the film needs to experience its own extinction, needs to take the risk of minimizing fictionalisation, all of which invites the audience to prick up their ears and open their eyes. Hence this peculiar attention drawn to glows, fireflies and ‘infra-sounds’, so many elements that arouse an emotion that is inversely proportional to their own light or sound intensity. The episode of the excursion into the cave, a temple where Boonmee comes to take his last breath, is in this respect a climax of intensity: a plunge into darkness, a whispered confession prompted by angst at the prospect of potential blindness, but also the lucky and unexpected discovery of a sparkling vault in the depths of darkness, the setting of the death chamber, the last breaths lulled by the dying man’s dialysis trickling down, a sound as peaceful as the spurt of a spring. Then the next day, again the cutting light and the sun-filled buzzing of the jungle come to mix, in the most natural way, with the threnodies delivered at the funeral, arranged as if for an electro set: where the thread of tonelessness morphs into the extasy of a liberating trance. It is likely that never since Antonioni’s final sequence shot in The Passenger has an agony been rendered with so much patience, conveying in its very movement a feeling of compassion that is purely cinematic, i.e. uniquely connected to simple perceptions that are luminous, spatial, but above all auditory and temporal.”
Joachim Lepastier, Cahiers du cinéma, September 2010