Comparing to his previous films, "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" is such mediocre, only until the last scene. That scene is about a new monk fled from temple without any obstacle, walked into hotel alone without hesitation, and came in a room of two ladies who acted naive like idiots. This unreasonable, unconvincing and fake situation scene was made only to challenge censorship and authorities. It's a revenge to "Syndromes and a Century" case. ("Phantom of Nabua" is another cheap revenge.) And this time he won in the name of Palme d'Or.

I'm OK if Apichatpong wanted to be a catfish attacking princess. I'm absolutely OK if he wanted to sympathize those communists. But by used and abused Uncle Boonmee (if he really had lived human life) ? This kidney-sufferred Boonmee existed here only to be humiliated and neglected at last.

The monk scene, the doppelganger and the next bar scene are a declaration of independence over every Thai values. While those previous scenes of Buddhism and supersitition become meaningless and useless. At this moment "Uncle Boonmee" suddenly falls flat. This film is just a naive propaganda in disguise of cinema.

"Uncle Boonmee" is simply his worst film. Its unreasonable ending is easily one of the most I hated in my life. It exposes how little Apichatpong knows about culture he denied.

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Apichatpong may sometimes tried to be “Kiarostami” but in fact he’s always being “Antonioni”. He didn’t understand (or consciously deny) Thai or local society and their multiple layers of relationship. This upper-middle-class-Chicago-educated filmmaker always individualized every characters in his films. Connections between people were shown in bad dialogues with awkward acting.

Absence of Kiarostami's humanism (which flourished from relationship between people), Apichatpong filled this void with superstition and its superb exoticism that even local people feel foreign to.

“Tropical Malady” is still the best of him because it only dealt with some individualized (homosexual) outsiders in some foreign land (where they never feel like home but a journey). The first rural part of “Syndromes and a Century” is a disaster, while the industrialized second part is incredibly good.

His films also refused to be a part of Thai value like those Cherd Songsri's traditional films (which he once claimed he adored). In case of rural Northeastern lives, he lacked truism and humanism of Wichit Kunawut’s best films. While in term of people-agianst-system he failed to capture social hierarchy that once best shown in early period of Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol’s career. And in the manner of leftist cinema he lacked journalistic depth and sincerity of the legendary "Tongpan".

Apichatpong "played" with folklores and "used" them to represent his agenda, not their own value. He once said his films never "represent Thailand". They denied to be part of national cinema (a good quote reacting to the emerging Nationalism in the country), though actually he failed to capture its essence.

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Recently some film critics tried to defend this pretension by calling it a process that those characters were "weerasethakulized" (or whatever-ed) to be "stiff" and unnatural like these. Well that's prejudice, not criticism.

What can I do to defend Apichatpong is that his films are based on installation art. Installation only needs to present physical things. It usually puts two or more different things in some space to create some meaning or feeling in audience's mind. It can represent almost everything from revolution, human rights to meditation, everything individual, but no humanism because it (or we) can't represent human relations by showing physical things.

Humanism needs narrative, good and simple. Apichatpong and his characters were afraid of emotional human relations. So they always ran away into their imagination called superstition.

At the end of “Uncle Boonmee”, after stayed in rural province for a while and came back from their superstitional escapade, Apichatpong’s both-sexes muses are ready to go back to every city of the world suffering love/hate antonionian happiness. These uprooted petits bourgeois have nothing left to declare because they never had any at all.

And this is my declaration : “Critics, especially Thai, should stop spoiling Apichatpong Weerasethakul immediately!” He’s been running a long, wrong way downhill since “Tropical Malady”. (Anyway it's OK if you only count on Palme d'Or, or anything golden)

I once wrote that Thai film critics don't understand criticism, though they're still struggling for free(er) speech (for what?). They always compromised with studios or directors cause they knew each others so well. This is a part of Thai value exactly. The patronizing-turns-capitalistic hierarchy of relationship.

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P.S.
1. This commentary didn’t intend to criticize Apichatpong’s political agenda or his personal matter. It only concerned about his films.
2. This will be the LAST time I wrote about Apichatpong. Because I don't want to be labelled as Apichatpong hater ALONE, which I'm not. And I don't even be a REAL film critic at all. So everyones please do your job. When you find something wrong in any film, don't just interpret it to be right. Please criticize.

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Added : December 2010

... I've never been talking about "reality of cinema" or "cinema of reality". I'm talking about reality of the real world. When a filmmaker declared to make a film and specified the place, people and the exact period of time, and he failed, he can't be excused by some ridiculous reason like - "cinema is not about reality".

Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee suffered the same failure and ignorance of reality as Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. And none of film critics in this world would make an excuse for Antonioni like - "cinema is not real" or "American people didn't understand Antonioni's intellectual symbolism".

I'm just amazed about how worst these Thai film critics of our generation could be, when they tried to defend their beloved filmmakers and close friends. Or they're just hungry for international fame of Thai cinema so much that they can throw anything else away.

And it's not "the magic of Cannes", as Apichatpong pointed, that helped Uncle Boonmee through Thai censorship board. It's the self-conscious inferior mind of asian people to western culture that dominate the world for the last two centuries since western imperialism. If Apichatpong gets an Oscar he will be god. And that's also not the magic of Oscar.

These ridiculous excuses of Thai film critics support the defeat of Thai cinema to western dominance (which I think it'll soon to be passe). This generation of critics may completely lose their connection with Thai culture and its own pride. They never want to offend any objection to their root. They think this will make them "liberal", which I think "ridiculous".

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Added : March 2011

Uncle Boonmee... is NOT about Buddhism. It's about how superficial these people reject Buddhism. The monk (or, in Marxist definition, the transformation of social status of the protagonist) exists here only for the filmmaker to complete his humiliation.