Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2010, and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970), [1] Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ Loong Boonmee raleuk chat, 2010) is a Thai film designed to conceal or to reveal. It must be one more than the other, never both in equal measure, and this precarious nature has led to confusion and, at times, disdain or dismissal by critics. Some, especially reviewers from Los Angeles, focus on political innuendos and allusions; the readings are not unjustified, given that the director's previous films in the series (this film is the final installment), as well as his own comments, tend to support such an interpretation. But to conclude that Uncle Boonmee is little more than a thinly veiled rumination on racism and essential human dignity, on the manner by which the Thai government routinely eradicates opposition and revises history, or on the deaths of innocent people during the anti-communist campaigns is perhaps unwarranted. In point of fact, this film is constructed as an artistic montage in which various Thai styles from comic books to old-style films comprise a sequence of images wherein the lines between realms of real and irreal conspicuously blur.
Repository Citation
Dobson, Kenneth. "Review of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss2/34