Screens — Uncle Boonmee, The Act of Killing, Dear Ex
By Adolfo Aranjuez
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010 // 109 mins // Stan
‘Ghosts aren’t attached to places, but to people, the living.’
Hauntings have been forefront of my mind, as we’re in the midst of what those of us in the Chinese diaspora (and related cultures) know as ‘Ghost Month’. It’s pretty coincidental, too, that this is my fourth column—we consider the number four unlucky due to its association with death (the words 四 and 死 are almost homophonous). But here we are, and here’s Stan delivering the goods: Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2010 Palme d’Or–winning masterpiece Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives has been placed on our streaming platter.
I’m going to be upfront about this: for the unfamiliar, Weerasethakul’s films can be bewildering. He has a penchant for obscurity and enigma; he opts for eclectic themes like the liminal (ha) spaces between death and life, or the cyclical quality of time, or humanity’s vexed yet vital link to nature. This affinity for the arcane extends to his visual styling: his films are unhurried, simultaneously realist and surreal, and filled with painstakingly composed tableaux that, in various ways, play with light. It’s arthouse at its finest, and you really just have to let yourself be taken by it.
Uncle Boonmee, his sixth feature, is probably one of his more accessible titles—yet it’s still a head-scratcher. Its titular character is afflicted with a kidney disease and doesn’t have long to live. One night, over dinner, he is visited by the ghost of his former wife, Huay, and his believed-to-be-dead son, Boonsong, who has actually transformed into a gorilla-like creature. Also present are Huay’s sister Jen, Jen’s son Tong and Boonmee’s nurse Jaai, who all join the family in recalling old times, reflecting on present tensions and ruminating on could’ve-beens. Some time later, we see Boonmee’s farm and his Laotian workers who’ve snuck into the country without papers; he tells Jen he believes his illness has a karmic basis, as he’d killed suspected communists during his military days. We witness a tender exchange between dying husband and dead wife. We watch a transfixing scene of Boonmee’s death, before Jen and Tong return to their normal lives in the city.
The title’s invocation of ‘past lives’ seems a bit of a misnomer—we get but two minor glimpses of Uncle Boonmee’s previous incarnations (in one, he’s a lascivious catfish that seduces a princess, in a scene both captivating and creepy! or perhaps he is the princess; the film doesn’t clarify). Yet, in being joined by his wife’s ghost and his now-‘monstrous’ son, he does revisit a ‘past’ life: the one wherein they were all alive and well, as selves that they are not now. Soon after Huay and Boonsong first arrive, in fact, Boonmee whips out photo albums to indulge in elegiac reminiscence.
The photographic image itself plays a key, if subtle, role in Uncle Boonmee’s thematic fabric. In these early scenes, analog photos act as mementoes for affirming life. Towards the film’s end, delirious in near-death, Boonmee shares a vision of one of his future lives in a world terrorised by men with light-shining devices able to make others ‘disappear’. Considering that, at the time, Weerasethakul openly lamented cinema’s increasing adoption of digital technologies (his tune has changed since), it’s hard not to connect these commentaries on human death and the ‘death’ of a medium.
If none of the above has quite given you an idea of what ‘happens’ in the film, that’s because achieving such a feat is likely impossible—‘You don’t need to understand everything,’ mused Weerasethakul upon Uncle Boonmee’s release, ‘to appreciate a certain beauty.’ And if existence is but a stream of lives and blurred timelines, then, here, Weerasethakul has crafted a film that similarly cascades image upon image, idea upon idea. Some are more apprehensible to the mind than others, but all are nonetheless bathed in the same meandering, profoundly metaphysical elegance.
• • •
The Act of Killing
Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012 // 159 mins // DocPlay
In many ways, the work of a documentarian is necessarily the telling of others’ stories. But what if, as Joshua Oppenheimer has done, you hand a camera over to your subjects while also keeping your hands firmly on your own to recount both their story and their experience of telling their story? Such questions of perspective and power lie at the heart of The Act of Killing, which employs a multivocal approach to relive and redress the 1965–1966 Indonesian ‘communist purge’ that saw an estimated 500,000 people die at the hands of paramilitary forces.
The documentary’s central figure is Congo Anwar, a former leader of one of the death squads responsible. Joined by a few other ex-heads, he is tasked with creating filmic dramatisations of their murderous ‘accomplishments’. Being a huge film fan—and a former ticket scalper outside movie theatres—Anwar jumps aboard with zeal, unaware of Oppenheimer’s true intentions. As he and the others proceed to make short westerns, musicals and gangster flicks, acting out not just their ostensibly nation-serving duties but also the suffering of those they’ve harmed, some face a change of heart; in adopting their victims’ perspective, they’re cornered into positions of overwhelming empathy. Anwar, in particular, is seemingly staggered by the heinousness of his actions, his guilt manifesting in uncontrollable (but unspoken) bodily expressions.
The Act of Killing is both comprehensive and concise in its handling of the subject at hand. In particular, it emphasises the way in which Anwar et al. fancy themselves ‘heroes’—both in the context of a supposed war against ‘criminal’ communists (indeed, they are revered across Indonesia) and in the hermeneutic sense: as the protagonists of the genre films of their lives. Attention is also paid to the process of myth-making and its ties to the propaganda machine: the death squad leaders’ venerated position is a product of patriotic fearmongering, which, in turn, fuels each man’s congratulatory (and conscience-clean) mindset. In asking the men to fashion narratives of their own, however, they are inevitably confronted with the same ethical conundrums—around veracity, responsibility and motivation—that plague all storytellers.
The deliberately fragmented structure of The Act of Killing—intermingling Oppenheimer’s documentary with Anwar and pals’ creations—affords space for a dialectic between the killers’ delusional self-aggrandisement and the damaged realities they’ve left in their wake. (This does mean that, yes, the aforementioned ethical conundrums befall Oppenheimer as well, but let’s not get too meta.) With this, Oppenheimer underlines the power of cinema as a medium for inhabiting the lives of others, and for making real that which is imagined or ignored: spectres from the past, sins buried deep in the guilt-ridden subconscious. Most importantly, his film forges a path for testimony, acting as a chisel against the dam wall of censorship and silence that has slowly begun to crack.
(If you’re interested in this topic, do also check out Oppenheimer’s follow-up documentary: 2014’s The Look of Silence, which involves one of the massacre survivors demanding contrition from the men who victimised his family. It’s available on DocPlay and Tubi.)
• • •
Dear Ex
Hsu Chih-yen & Hsu Mag, 2018 // 99 mins // Netflix
There’s likewise a ghostly element – but of a more lighthearted kind – in Dear Ex, a Taiwanese comedy-drama about a teenager, Cheng-xi, caught in the middle of a feud between his mother and his recently deceased father’s secret male lover. This setup alone hints at the high stakes (and hijinks) that define the film, but there’s more: prior to his death, Cheng-xi’s father had named his lover, Ray, the sole beneficiary of his insurance policy, much to the ire of the now-widowed Sanlian, whose consent is required to enact the transaction. Cheng-xi finds himself so drawn to his father’s mysterious ‘mistress’ (as Sanlian calls him) that he decides to live with him instead. Neither Ray nor Sanlian is happy with the arrangement, but, as they come to terms with their shared loss, all three are forced to locate points of mutual understanding.
Despite his absence from the diegetic present, Cheng-xi’s father is, of course, prominent in the film: the whimsical Ray is regularly swept up in bittersweet, nostalgic daydream, while the harried Sanlian, effectively abandoned by her husband in his last days, has inherited his messes and loose ends. Then there are Cheng-xi’s unresolved issues with his father—not around sexual orientation (the teen alleges he’d always known his father was gay), but, rather, the secrecy and distance that meant his dad had slipped away long before he drew his final breath.
Using a young person’s perspective to offset a story’s gravity with levity is not particularly original; in this respect, Dear Ex reminded me of Taika Waititi’s Boy. But Hsu Chih-yen and Hsu Mag’s positioning of Cheng-xi as the linchpin for a film that rollicks into high melodrama gives Dear Ex its points of difference. For one, the whiny teen is pretty irritating, sulking around and imposing himself upon Ray, who just wants to process his grief, all while barking ungratefully at his equally aching mother. For her part, Sanlian is the epitome of the smothering Asian mum—almost stereotypically so—at once doting on and berating her son, and prone to fits of theatrical oration that assert her status as both martyr and hero. And Ray, well, he’s the self-involved diva of your nightmares, hell-bent on playing the cool rebel, and patronising his underlings at the community theatre for their inability to realise his directorial vision. Cheng-xi is the moody wildchild that neither adult can pin down and whom both must love in place of his father. It’s the sharp tongues and performances of this acerbic trio that give this explosive chamber piece its fire.
Yet Dear Ex, at its core, is about vulnerability; like its characters, the showy exterior is a carapace masking a scarred heart. I won’t spoil it, but do persevere if any/all of these three get at your nerves. Be patient, too, with the slight issues in pace: the film is pretty bottom-heavy, while the shifts in perspective that serve to flesh out Sanlian’s agency and Ray’s backstory jar somewhat. Instead, let yourself be swept up by the vivid palette (night-time Taipei looks especially beautiful), compositions that embed characters in place (on the street, in the flat, in proximity) and the score of pining, poignant soft rock, all of which envelop the actors’ electric turns in a compassionate warmth. Once it’s ventured beyond its central trio’s bickering—around the halfway mark—the film begins to evolve from a story about three people collectively mourning, to one about sons reconciling with mothers and how love expresses in acts of service and self-abnegation. By the time the curtain falls, you’ll have realised that Dear Ex is the heartbreaker you weren’t expecting.