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Rating: A rural landscape, the dawn of some past time, a buffalo escaping into the forest, places where ancestral beings as old as existence itself observe the world with fiery eyes.
Thailand, one of these days, Boonmee, suffering from kidney failure, invites his only relatives living in the city to spend some time on his farm, intending to leave them the house and crops in the event of his death.
On the same day of their arrival, during dinner, Boonmee's past life begins to materialize: his deceased wife (with whom Boonmee will have a dialogue on death and existence of rare beauty, rarefied and dense with silences as well as meanings), the son who escaped into the forest many years before; forest that assumes a central role as it is a womb of spirits and ancestral beings, memories of the past and legends.
The forest will vomit onto Boonmee all its mythical framework and will accompany him and his relatives in the search for a womb in which to die (and presumably be reborn).
Do not think that this passage is light; Boonmee's last memories are images of a dream that takes us to a dimension suspended between past and future, visually rendered with photographs, chilling snapshots of young Thai soldiers, chained hominid beings, while Boonmee’s dying voice tells us of people who “disappear”.
All that will remain for the relatives is to return to their tiny apartment in Bangkok, an oppressive place of incommunicability and solitude that not even the metaphysical experience lived with the uncle managed to overcome.
Two totally separate and irreconcilable worlds where communication is now completely impossible.
The director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (อภิชาติพงศ์ วีระเศรษฐกุล), a thorough video experimenter, with this film, part of a larger project called “Primitive”, on rediscovering places and memories of his childhood and winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010; shot the story related to Boonmee in the Issan region, in the Northeast, one of the poorest in Thailand, places from where the “red shirts” started, who agitated and upset Bangkok in 2010 with their protest, violently repressed by the police.
The film in my view is a great metaphor related to modern Thailand (but also to Southeast Asia in general) that has almost irreversibly lost the image of a mythical/mystical past and continues an inexorable and unbalanced economic development full of apathy, incommunicability, tiny and aseptic apartments, empty gazes, chaos.
The megalopolis Bangkok with its immense roads and skyline is the heart of this new human flatness where the spiritual and religious is totally absent.
There are no more legendary beings with fiery eyes in Thailand, only many people with vacant gazes who occasionally “disappear.”
“paradise is an overrated concept”
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