It wasn't just his name that confounded the pundits at Cannes this year: when the Thai architect turned director Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Palme d'Or his surreal, experimental and dreamlike work was thrust into the mainstream – the realm of his unlikely inspiration, Steven Spielberg, he tells Donald Clarke
WHEN Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival the world’s press couldn’t decide whether to be surprised. Reacting to that unwieldy (to non-Thais, at least) name and to the fact that he was neither Mike Leigh nor Ken Loach, many pundits described the victory as a head- spinning shocker. More experienced Cannes watchers cast their eyes to heaven at such ignorance and muttered “About time”.
Though he has only just turned 40, Weerasethakul has been a Cannes darling for quite some time. Blissfully Yours, his 2002 feature, won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard strand. Tropical Malady,released two years later, won the festival's Jury Prize – the bronze medal in the official competition.
The director’s rise to the status of arthouse darling confirms the medium’s stubborn ability to surprise. While we were busy looking around for the new Ingmar Bergman (taut social disharmony) or the new Andrei Tarkovsky (beautiful stasis), a young Thai experimentalist, originally an architect, was forging an entirely fresh combination of folk drama, erotic surrealism and off-beam comedy.
Was he surprised to win the top prize at Cannes? “Oh yes,” he says. “They told me the day before that we had won something, but we didn’t know what. The Palme d’Or is the last prize. So we waited and waited. We began to think maybe they had made a mistake.” Trim and friendly, speaking in beautiful English, Weerasethakul does not remember May 2010 with undiluted joy. While Cannes frolicked along, violent conflicts between police and protesters – the so-called redshirts – were playing themselves out on the streets of Bangkok.
There was a danger that he might never have made it to France.
“There were all kinds of delays,” he says. “My passport was held up at the British embassy, which is in the main part of the city – and the city was burning. The next day there was a rumour that the authorities were going to start shooting. A curfew was announced. I got to the airport hotel and hoped for the best.”
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Livesdoes acknowledge the political turmoil that still bubbles in southeast Asia. There are references to the Thai campaign against communist insurgents. But, for the most part, this is a seductive, anaesthetising, soothingly fatalistic piece of work. Like so much of Weerasethakul's back catalogue, the film features sudden, almost jarring shifts in tone and focus.
A core story is, however, discernable among the agreeable confusion. A middle-aged man, seriously ill with kidney disease, contemplates his ebbing life in a remote corner of the jungle. His late wife returns in recognisable form. His lost son reappears as a lumbering, hairy primate with red, glowing eyes. A pervasive fug of decay and regret hangs mournfully over the piece.
“It’s a film about the idea of remembering,” Weerasethakul ventures. “The challenge was how to present second-hand memory on film. I was focused on the idea of how to present film as a memory machine – how such a thing can represent time and place. I have put a lot of my father into the film. He also died of kidney disease.”
APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL – Joe to his Anglophone pals – was born in Bangkok to parents who were both doctors. After taking a degree in architecture from Khon Kaen University he flung himself into independent film-making and then, sure in his vocation, embarked on an MA in film-making at the University of Chicago.
The influence of his architectural training can be seen in features such as 2006’s hugely praised Syndromes and a Century. The camera discovers extraordinary things in bland corners and superficially unremarkable service ducts.
That interest in the strangeness of structures is a key element in the Weerasethakul aesthetic.
“I had a genuine enthusiasm for architecture, but at the same time studying it did involve a certain compromise. It was something to fall back on. My parents were very liberal, but film-making is not really considered a proper career in Thailand. I did my thesis on the film studio, and that helped me learn the process.”
Occasionally touching on gay themes, always enlivened by a sly humour, Weerasethakul's work took on its characteristic slippery tone from the very beginning. Mysterious Object at Noon, his first feature, released in 2000, was described as a documentary, but its dizzy weirdness defied all traditional modes of classification.
Where on earth did this come from? It’s difficult to trace any obvious influences in the work.
"I always cite Spielberg as an early influence." Steven Spielberg? Are we thinking of the same film-maker? "Yes. I don't see why that is strange. I was 12 when ETexploded. We don't have film culture like you have here. I was immediately taken by the way he used the dolly and the way he used effects. It was very effective emotionally. He was very good before War of the Worlds– that was so bad. But he was very good until then."
While studying in Chicago, Weerasethakul was introduced to great experimental film-makers such as Maya Deren (of the circular, spooky Meshes of the Afternoon), Stan Brackhage (of the unsettling Dog Star Man)and Len Lye (of the abstract, scratchy Free Radicals). He admits that these peculiar, often wilfully obtuse pieces opened up new vistas for him.
You could, if you were being moronically reductive, view Weerasethakul’s own aesthetic as an unlikely amalgam of the experimental tradition and Spielberg’s more easily digestible populism.
Certainly, few "difficult" films are quite so funny as Uncle Boonmee. The big woolly ghosts are a hoot. The subplot about a princess who makes love to a catfish also triggers hearty guffaws.
Weerasethakul explains that much of Uncle Boonmee'svisual language derives from popular Thai children's television of the 1970s and 1980s. The references to ancient myths are not drawn from snooty anthropologists; they are plucked from cheap, mainstream interpretations of those stories. One thinks of Spielberg and his devotion to pulp post-war film serials.
“When I saw films by Deren and Brackhage, I suddenly realised film could be free,” Weerasethakul says. “But when you see that pure experimental stuff, you can certainly relate it back to Spielberg. You can see the frame being used in similar ways. It changes how you look at a Spielberg film. It’s not just about narrative. You see the material side of it.”
WORKING BOTH IN gallery-based video art and for the cinema, Weerasethakul admits that the insecure nature of his funding has shaped his approach: when you are forced to stop shooting for months on end, while producers make nice to evasive investors, you inevitably develop a somewhat episodic style.
At first, still sitting in the anteroom of the avant-garde, he was largely ignored by the Thai authorities. But, when the films began winning awards, the censors started to take notice. Syndromes and a Century,commissioned by the radical opera director Peter Sellars to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, went down particularly badly with the Thai censorship board, which cut four scenes (none remotely shocking). In response Weerasethakul and several colleagues came together to found the Free Thai Cinema Movement. "That is much less of a problem now," he explains. "The police used to take care of censorship, but when we protested the law was changed. The minister of culture is now in charge of that, and that is one step better. But there is still a very primitive attitude towards cinema in the government. When I won a prize in Korea recently, the [Thai] minister was there to congratulate me. I said thank you but told him I would still protest against him when I got home."
The director explains that, coming as it did at a time of great trauma, his win at Cannes was greatly celebrated in Thailand. He clearly has a complex relationship with his homeland (don’t all artists?).
He has lived in the north of the country since returning from Chicago but admits he often thinks, What am I doing in this shitty country? At least he doesn’t have to deal with the capital. “Bangkok? It’s an awful city. I think it brings out the bad in me – the way I drive apart from anything else. It just makes you aggressive.” For all that, Weerasethakul’s films are suffused with a passion for the landscape of Thailand and for the humour of its citizens. Creaking jungles, buzzing mopeds and heaving skies are everywhere about in his extraordinary work.
It remains to be seen if, now an international figure, he can retain that contact with his roots. The signs seem positive. An endlessly amiable chap, with no great pretensions, Joe seems unaffected by his emerging status as the century’s next great auteur. What unlikely things Steven Spielberg has wrought.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Livesis on limited release
Gold standard
The Palme d’Or, the top award at the Cannes film festival, sometimes gets a bad rap from journalists (both popular and elitist).
How did Roland Joffé's bogus The Missionwin in 1986? Surely Wild at Heart, victor in 1990, was the wrong David Lynch film to honour. Such gripes noted, it must be acknowledged that, in recent years, the Cannes jury has done an extremely good job.
The last five winners are as follows: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley,Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,Laurent Cantet's The Class and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon.
When, late last year, the time came for critics to draw up lists of the best films of the decade, those last four pictures figured highly.
The Wind that Shakes the Barleypicture is not one of Loach's greatest films, but it remains an effective exercise in epic fist-waving.
There have been a few recent hiccups. The jury's decision to honour Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11in 2004 appeared driven by political concerns rather than aesthetic ones.
Lars von Trier's barmy musical Dancer in the Dark, which featured Björk (left) and was triumphant in 2000, acted like fingernails down a blackboard to many sane viewers.
But these are exceptions to a run of highly regarded winners. Of course, the jury draws from a reliably classy shortlist. Producers of highbrow films work hard to ensure their juiciest treats are ready for Cannes.
The list of Palme d’Or winners remains an impressive guide to what matters in post-war cinema.
The award certainly knocks the hugely compromised best-picture Oscar into a cocked hat. Titanic?Really?
