'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives' review: Great Expectations?

The other day somebody from Sony was telling me how concerned they were that ‘The Social Network’ might be negatively affected by all the positive reviews: the idea being that they could generate a backlash against it. I can understand that concern because, however much I try to black out reviews and awards from my mind, it can be hard to view a film in a culture vacuum. For example, if you go and see a film that has won Best Picture at the Oscars, no matter how good it is, you might easily find yourself saying “yes, it was good. But it wasn't a Best Picture winner was it?”

I had such an experience last week as I saw Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ‘Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives’ playing at the 4th Kaunas International Film Festival in Lithuania. Having won the coveted Palm d’Or at this year’s (by many accounts subpar) Cannes Film Festival, I went into ‘Uncle Boonmee’ with dangerously high expectations. To me, post-Cannes, it was no longer a little Thai film from an interesting and experimental director. Instead it was inevitably now stacked up alongside the awards past recipients: “Is it as good as ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ or ‘The White Ribbon’?”



Of course, this is not at all fair. The award itself has nothing to do with the film, and this disperate band of unconnected past winners is even less relevant. A film should really be judged on its own merits. Perhaps this is true: but is it ever realistic? Or even possible?

Most critics will routinely compare a new work alongside others of the same genre or with other films made by the same director. Is this bad practice? I wonder how different the reception to some films might have been had the critics not known anything about the author going in. Would the 'Star Wars' prequels be so universally hated if people compared them to the bland likes of ‘Clash of the Titans’ or ‘Transformers’ as opposed to the original trilogy? And the opposite is likely true also: I can’t imagine ‘Inland Empire’, divorced from the legacy and reputation of David Lynch, would be endured by as many fawning acolytes.



So it was that I watched the Palm d’Or-winning ‘Uncle Boonmee’ expecting great things. 'Uncle Boonmee' follows the titular character as he looks back on his life whilst suffering from a terminal illness. He is visited by the ghost of a previous wife and by his son who has become an ape, whilst he also relives some past lives: most notably during a bizarre protracted sequence in which an deformed princess has sex with a catfish. The film is nothing if not unique.

I am usually a big fan of the so-called "slow cinema" movement. Recent examples like the Romanian 'Police, Adjective' and the Russian Golden Lion entry 'Ovsyanki' have thrilled me greatly. But 'Boonmee' did actually start to bore me with its long, ponderous takes and silent scenes of relative inactivity. And, in part due to its acclaim, I found myself trying to find reasons why it wasn't working for me. Perhaps I don't know enough about Buddhism and reincarnation? Perhaps I'm experiencing slow cinema fatigue after recent trips to film festivals?



Whatever it was, I didn't connect with 'Uncle Boonmee' on an emotional level and wasn't gripped by the folkloric story. It is unquestionably a bold and imaginative film, with the glowing red eyes of the mysterious monkey gods that stalk the jungle a particular visual highpoint. Weerasethakul is also a master of atmosphere, especially in terms of sound design. Earlier this year I saw one of his short art installation films, 'Phantoms of Nabua' (see bottom of review), playing at the BFI Southbank and it has clear parallels with 'Boonmee' in terms of the sharp nighttime cinematography and also in the way that it uses natural sounds which give you a real sense of being in the middle of a real space. Watching both this and 'Boonmee' I felt as though I was in the jungle at times.

It is also true that 'Boonmee' is often laugh-out-loud funny. One photomontage, midway through the film, shows a man in a monkey suits hugging some military men, whilst in another scene Boonmee describes how he killed communists in his time as a soldier commenting that they were a "pain in the ass". Yet these moments only served to raise my enjoyment levels fleetingly during the film's near two hour running length.



Whilst the Palm d'Or win will inevitably lead to wider distribution than the film could otherwise have hoped for, I don't think 'Uncle Boonmee' has the same potential with audiences as last year's Cannes big hitters did (namely 'Un Prophet' and 'The White Ribbon'). It is certainly an imaginative film which is beautiful to watch, yet ultimately, whether or not high expectations or festival film fatigue were to blame, 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives' just didn't do it for me on a visceral, gut level. Would I have felt differently had I seen it at that first show in Cannes when it was still an obscure oddity? It's possible, but I suppose I'll never know for sure.

Below is the art installation short 'Phantoms of Nabua'. 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives' is released in the UK on the 19th of November and is not yet rated by the BBFC.

'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail' review: A brief, but thoroughly enjoyable, early Kurosawa film...

Here is a follow-up to yesterday's post regarding my trip to see a very rare early Kurosawa film at the BFI Southbank. I didn't know quite what to expect from the 1945 film 'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail' but I was really pleasantly surprised by what I saw tonight. One of the few things I knew about the film before going in was that it based on an old 12th Century Japanese tale and uses aspects of Nah and Kabuki theatre adaptations in its telling. I worried slightly that this may be alienating or (frankly) boring to watch, but actually the film was really well paced and consistently entertaining. Of course, it helped that it ran at a brisk 58 minutes in length.

'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail' really feels like the simple, effective telling of an age-old tale. What surprised me the most was that, despite the fact the film pre-dates his "golden period", many of Kurosawa's trademark shots and techniques are visible here. There are screenwipes, quick cuts between multiple protagonists and even many of his consistent themes are invoked (humanist values, criticism of traditional values and the emphasis on male characters). Furthermore, the film features a number of actors he would later rely on such as Masayuki Mori ('Rashomon', 'The Idiot', 'The Bad Sleep Well'), Susumu Fujita ('Yojimbo', 'The Hidden Fortress') and the great Takashi Shimura (too many to mention, most famously 'Ikiru' and 'Seven Samurai').

As I wrote yesterday, I couldn't pass up the chance to see this rarely screened film which is unavailable on DVD (at least in the UK). I wondered what the quality of the print would be like for this movie and when it started it was plain to see not only that this piece of film had been around since the film's US release in 1952, but that it was an American version. For one thing the subtitles looked like they had been scratched directly onto the film and, more obviously, the opening credits and titles were all in English. There was also a three page forward giving the context of the story and telling us that "this is a story which is loved by the Japanese". Sometimes the sound went and even the picture cut out at other times, but I found that strangely charming. After seeing the remastered splendour of 'Rashomon' the week before, it was sort of nice to see what a used and abused print looked like. It was a great advert for the likes of Martin Scorsese, who tell us frequently about the need to restore and maintain older films. Hopefully somebody will do the same for this movie before it is worn out of existence!



This is not to criticise the BFI at all. They deserve kudos for finding and screening such an unsung and obscure film as this as part of their Kurosawa season. The screening (admittedly in one of the smaller screens) was pleasingly quite well attended too and the movie played to a good atmosphere, with the comedy of contemporary comedian Kenichi "Enoken" Enomoto going down a storm. Enoken is really exaggerated and campy throughout but his porter character (introduced to the tale by Kurosawa) is what makes the film satirical, as he undermines the heroism and traditional values of the party of soldiers he is in service of. Displaying all the cowardice and opportunism of the lowly pair later seen in 'The Hidden Fortress', the porter delightfully contradicts the earnest Bushido of the rest of the film.

I don't usually go in for plot synopsis here, but seeing as this film is so hard to come by it might be a good idea. Basically, a group of warriors are disguised as travelling monks in order to escort their lord safely into another territory as he is on the run after a dispute with the ruling clan (in another plot element reminiscent of 'The Hidden Fortress'). However, they are expected at the checkpoint barrier and the film mainly involves a stand-off between the head warrior (Captain Beneki, played by the wonderful Denjiro Okochi) and the barrier guard (Togashi, played by Fujita) as he attempts to convince him that the group are the monks they claim to be. It is sometimes funny, sometimes actually very tense and always gripping stuff.

When the barrier guards recognise one of the porters as the wanted lord, Beneki trashes his master with a stick, supposedly to discipline him for being slow. Convinced that a warrior would never beat his master the barrier guard agree to let the men pass. Apparently the debate among Japanese fans of the old tale is whether Togashi knows that Beneki is lying or not, perhaps deciding to let him pass regardless. However here, in this telling, I believe Kurosawa has Togashi convinced by the beating, so stuck is he in an old code of honour now obsolete. Or at least, if not wholly convinced, Beneki breaks all the rules and Togashi is socially unable to accuse another man of his class of that dishonesty and ultimate shame. To deal with his shame at beating his master (in order to save his life) Beneki is shown to drink a barrel full of sake, much like Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo does in 'Seven Samurai' after his own shameful episode.



Despite its brevity there is a lot to take in after watching 'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail', a complex and thoroughly entertaining film. I had expected to find myself appreciating it more than liking it and had hoped to see the genesis of some of Kurosawa's later work represented in this early film. Instead what I was treated to was a film full of such moments, but which also worked completely in its own right. It was made quite cheaply and is entirely set-bound (with painted exterior backdrops), but it is quite atmospheric all the same thanks to Kurosawa's direction and the photography of Takeo Itô (who later worked on 'Drunken Angel'). Enoken's rampant over-acting may grate with some, so (intentionally) at odds is it with the rest of the piece, but if you get the chance to see it some time in the future then I would recommend you spend 58 minutes watching 'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail'. Especially if you appreciate Kurosawa's later work.

'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail' is currently exempt from classification by the BBFC. However, with the complete absence of shown violence or any bad language it would comfortably receive a 'U' in my opinion.

Remember when I told you I would shut up about Kurosawa? I lied!

On Monday I said that my recent flurry of celebratory posts about the films of Akira Kurosawa would com to an end with that review of the incredible reissued print of 'Rashonmon'. Well, predictably I am banging on about Kurosawa again. This time to say that I am going back to the BFI Southbank tomorrow to see a rare wartime film of his which I know precious little about: 'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail'. The earliest of Kurosawa's films I have seen to date is 1948's 'Drunken Angel' (his first film starring Toshiro Mifune and the film on which he felt he'd discovered himself as a filmmaker). Most of the films which came out after 'Drunken Angel' are readily available to buy on DVD in the UK and so out of his 30 films I have been lucky enough to see 20 to date. However 'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail' will be the first of his 6 "early period" films which I will have seen. I'm really excited by this rare chance to see a film which is completely unavailable to buy in this country.

Amazingly, although the film was shot in 1945, it wasn't released until 1952 as it was banned by the American occupation (a fact Kurosawa attributed to a "mean-spirited" censor rather than the content of his film). I can't wait to see what all the fuss was about.

On a separate note (but still on the subject of Japanese cinema) I received a book in the post today by an American writer called Peter H. Brothers. He has written a comprehensive book in celebration of the overlooked godfather of the monster movie, Ishiro Honda (best known for the original 1954 'Godzilla'). The book is called 'Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda' and I can't wait to read it and review it here. Incidently, Honda was a good friend (and one-time assistant director) of a certain Kurosawa. In fact he is known to have directed huge parts of Kurosawa's 1990 film 'Dreams' and was ever-present on the set during his final films.

Here is the trailer to the fantastic 'Godzilla' which stars the great Takashi Shimura and is a much better film than the campy series that followed would lead you to think:

'Rashomon' re-issue review: A much needed big screen outing for a true classic...

I have recently written a fair bit on this blog about the work of Akira Kurosawa. Jon and I recently recorded a special Kurosawa-themed Splendor Cinema podcast, whilst I have also written here about my favourite of his films and about some of the re-makes he inspired. On Friday I visited the BFI Southbank in London where I took advantage of their awesome world cinema shop to purchase a copy of his splendid autobiography and also fill some the gaps in my DVD collection: I found copies of ‘The Idiot’, ‘The Bad Sleep Well’, ‘Drunken Angel’ and ‘High and Low’. Most importantly, I took the opportunity to watch his international breakthrough, the Golden Lion winning 1950 film ‘Rashomon’, now in a glorious restored print which has been re-issued at selected cinemas nationwide.



‘Rashomon’ had previously been a film I admired more than enjoyed. I appreciated how significant it was in opening the eyes of western critics to Japanese cinema and I also understood its influence, the narrative structure (focussing on four subjective accounts of a rape and murder) has been copied by a countless number of films and has also been adapted by science and philosophy – the so-called “Rashomon effect”. But when I saw it on Friday it marked the first time I had seen the film on the big screen and its impact on me was much greater.

Partly this was down to paying the film greater attention than I had possibly done in the past. In a cinema it is just you and the film. You can’t pause it. You can’t look at your phone. You can’t go and get a drink and you hesitate to leave for the toilet. It holds your complete, undivided attention.

This time I noticed the virtuosity of Kurosawa’s camera work, often panning and swooping in elaborate long takes. Just as often it is still and patient with the director allowing the action to move in and out of the frame. It is in many ways a masterclass in how to shoot a film, especially action sequences. Like his hero John Ford, Kurosawa is able to make everything look deceptively simple and made his films with great economy. The film feels tight, disciplined and is basically as close to perfect as any movie could hope to be.



The performances are also fantastic. Toshiro Mifune is at his most cat-like as a snarling bandit accused of murder, whilst Takashi Shimura gives a great turn as a woodcutter who reports the crime, with some scenes of emotional poignancy to rival his more celebrated role in ‘Ikiru’. There are also roles for lesser known Kurosawa regulars such as Minoru Chiaki (who plays a troubled priest) and Masayuki Mori (above) as the murdered samurai. There is also Machiko Kyō, who almost steals the show as the samurai’s wife. Kyō cries and screams with an intensity which renders her performance unforgettable. Like almost every female in a Kurosawa movie, she is also called upon to be somewhat conniving and manipulative which she does with some gusto (representations of women are not Kurosawa’s strongest suit, for that see Mizoguchi, Ozu or Naruse) .

But more impressive than its stars and the great craft of its master director is its typically humanist portrayal of the characters. During the varying accounts of the central murder, what struck me was that the emphasis is not on the practical differences between the accounts, but on something subtler. It is the difference in tone, the different emotional reactions to the event and the changes in meaning which shape this tale and give ‘Rashomon’ its depth. During the trial scenes, in which the characters gather to give their testimonies, the judges are unseen. We are only shown the storytellers themselves talking to camera. Therefore when they lie the implication is that they are only lying to themselves (and perhaps to us).

The bandit wants us to believe he is a hard man, a skilful swashbuckler and a user of women. Watching him speak you feel he has succeeded in convincing himself. The samurai (whose testimony comes via a medium) gives an account in which he dies an honourable death by suicide to compensate for the shame he feels at seeing his wife raped. However the woodcutter’s story (in all details but one final twist taken to be the “true” account) reveals that both men were cowardly: that they fought but that it involved a lot of falling over and scrambling in the dirt. During the encounter Mifune pants loudly: out of breath and full of fear.



They never really cross swords (as in the bandit's version above); instead they swing wildly and run away from each other. The samurai’s final words are “I don’t want to die”. The truth is pathetic, not heroic or romantic. The truth is human. Kurosawa’s point is not that all people are bad or that all people are cowards, but that people are flawed. That we should be suspicious of those who portray themselves as honourable, just as we should of those who promote the idea that they are the opposite. That people are not caricatures: they are complicated.

Happily, for Kurosawa and ‘Rashomon’, there is just as much good as bad in the world. The priest’s faith in humanity is restored by the woodcutter’s decision to adopt an abandoned baby and defend it against a man who seeks to rob it of its few possessions. The woodcutter is told by the man that all people are selfish and that being selfish is necessary to survive (a popular view among capitalists). But the woodcutter rejects this assessment of humanity and, although he already has six children, he takes on the responsibility of another. This final moment sees Kurosawa at his most sentimental, but it is the necessary conclusion to the story and one which gives us hope.



It is hope which is an important final message for Kurosawa and Japan in ‘Rashomon’. Made in the aftermath of the Second World War in a battered and defeated nation, the film is in part allegorical. It opens on a broken gate, a relic from a period of prosperity and cultural richness. The woodcutter and the priest find shelter under this ruin as a heavy rainfall lashes down throughout the film. When the woodcutter adopts the infant the rainfall stops and the duo are able to leave the broken past behind and walk into a more hopeful future, for Japan and for the world. Fitting for a film which heralded a similarly bright future for Japanese cinema.

I, obviously, highly recommend seeking out ‘Rashomon’ in a cinema near you. It is playing at the BFI Southbank until the 8th of July on an extended run and is rated ‘12A’ by the BBFC.

Ozu monogatari: Mark Cousin's stares into the void

According to Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu made films of “dignified severity”. He meant it as a criticism. In terms of the films they gave us, the two men could hardly have been more different: you certainly couldn’t confuse the horse chase sequence in ‘The Hidden Fortress’ or the titular ‘Seven Samurai’ running through the tall grass to save the villagers (both conveying an urgency and a sense of speed) with the famous stillness found in Ozu’s work. The most famous examples of his work are slow, small-scale family dramas like ‘Early Spring’ and ‘Tokyo Story’ (though, as Tony Rayns points out in last month’s Sight and Sound, he made many other types of film in his long and prolific career at Shochiku).

Yet Ozu’s films are no less compelling than Kurosawa’s. They delight with their attention to detail. In Ozu’s films, pauses are emphasised, shots linger, often with the camera close to the ground or looking in at the “action” from another room. External shots of trains going by are a common occurrence and seem simply to mark the passing of time and require patience. They are formal, beautiful and poignant: emotional, yet never mawkish or sentimental. Ozu never had wife or family of his own, yet he told stories about families which speak a universal truth, such as when the well-meaning elderly couple of ‘Tokyo Story’ find themselves to be an unwelcome inconvenience when visiting their (now grown up) children, who have jobs to attend to and children of their own to raise. None of the people in these stories are wrong or bad: they just are.

I am writing about Ozu because there has been a lot of attention paid to his work recently. This has partly been due to the fact that this month sees a programme of Ozu films playing at the BFI Southbank (until February 27th) and partly because similarities between Ozu’s work and that of Hirokazu Kore-eda are being drawn in reviews of his new film ‘Still Walking’ (Sight & Sound’s Film of the Month for February). Noted film historian David Thomson has also seen fit to contribute a snobby and pompous article about Ozu versus ‘Avatar’ for the Guardian newspaper. But the piece that caught my attention was a tribute paid to the great man by Mark Cousins during BBC Radio 4’s Film Programme. During the programme, Cousins described not only his appreciation for Ozu, but also his experience visiting Ozu’s grave recently. He describes how the man he sees as the “centre of film history” is represented by a tombstone without a name or any dates, but simply the Chinese character “Mu” which he translates as “emptiness” or “the void”, but which can also be read as “the space between all things”. "Dignified severity" indeed.

Surrounded by tributes of alcohol (like Kurosawa, Ozu was a notorious alcoholic) this grave is somehow the ultimate monument to a man whose films faced the facts of human existence, however apparently bleak, without any need to sugar coat them. He didn’t even want to romanticise his own passing from this Earth. That takes a special kind of dedication to the “truth” so often talked about by artists. Yet Ozu was not a pretentious artist. He was a company man. He was loyal to one studio his whole life and made a great many films (from the silent-era onwards) as a hired gun. He was disciplined and demanding, a perfectionist, but not at the expense of his humility. And whilst his films are not sentimental, they are not without sentiment (‘Tokyo Story’, for one, is a real tear jerker). He was, for me, a real humanist with a deep understanding of, and affection for, life’s smaller moments. He is survived by his films and not by a piece of stone.

Apparently Mark Cousins visit to the grave was made as part of an upcoming documentary on Ozu’s life and work. I, for one, look forward to a closer look at this fascinating 20th century artist if and when it is released. I will keep an eye out.