By Leo Bankersen
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, this year's surprise Golden Palm winner, will get its first Dutch screening at the new festival World Cinema Amsterdam next weekend. The Cannes jury had caused some noise with this choice even among critics. After all, was this ghost story by the Thai filmmaker with the unpronounceable name now a dull and obscure film, or rather a cinematic masterpiece?
Both qualifications, incidentally, put you on the wrong track. Apichatpong Weerasethakul tells the story of a man who travels to his old home on the edge of the Thai jungle to spend his last days there. As has been the case in Weerasethakul's previous work, events rippling along unremarkably and unsuspectingly at first, until suddenly there is a magical twist that is difficult to interpret. At least for viewers who, conditioned by American-style mystery films, expect that there will be a logical explanation anyway.
In Uncle Boonmee, the ghost of his deceased wife and his son turned into a monkey calmly slide in at dinner, and we have to make do with that. You can at least take it as a touching metaphor about saying goodbye, though that still leaves that curious episode in which a princess is satisfied by a catfish. Still, that too is something I wouldn't have wanted to miss.
Those who have followed Weerasethakul a little know, by the way, that this is not new territory for him. He made his debut back in 2000 with the documentary Mysterious Object at Noon. He has the compatriots he portrays in it make up a chain story in which very strange things are also already happening.
World Cinema Amsterdam will take place from 12 - 22 August at Rialto, Amsterdam. The programme features the best films from Asia, Africa and Latin America, with this year Mexico receiving special attention. Part of the programme can also be seen in The Hague, Utrecht, Eindhoven and Arnhem.
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