The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · a film · 2010 · about 114 minutes · in Thai and the Isan dialect, as Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat
Mode
Ghost story, family drama of a dying and folk fable in one; a passage through forms made in the manners of older Thai cinema
Mythos
Rebirth as the structure; the cave as womb and grave; the dead wife who nurses, the son become an animal, the princess and the catfish spirit
Phase
A man’s last days on his farm, from a buffalo breaking loose at night through a dinner with the dead to a death in a cave, a funeral, and a hotel room after
Presentation
Feature film, about 114 minutes, shot on 16mm and framed at about 1.85:1, in Thai and the Isan dialect; non-professional players, no composed score, a field of forest sound
Register
Calm and even throughout; long fixed takes in near darkness, a ghost arriving as a guest, wonder that is sometimes cold, and a deadpan close
Scale
One household of the living and the dead, a province and its buried history, and the forms a life may pass through
Governing Proposition
A man dying of kidney failure on his farm in the north-east of Thailand is visited by the ghost of his wife and by his lost son, returned from the forest as a creature, and walks at last into a cave where he believes he was born. The wager of the film is that in this province the dead are not gone and the violence done here is not gone either, that a self passes through forms without ceremony, and that a cinema which gives a ghost and a dialysis bag the same weight and the same duration can hold both as plain fact.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at night, with an animal. A water buffalo breaks loose and walks away into the trees, and from among the trees a figure with red eyes watches. No one in the film has yet appeared, and the camera does not explain what it sees. Before there is a man there is a beast, a forest and something in the forest looking out, and the film will spend its length suggesting that these may be one life in several forms.
Then the farm. Boonmee, played by Thanapat Saisaymar, is dying of kidney failure on his tamarind and bee farm in Isan, the north-east of Thailand. With him are Jen, his sister-in-law, played by Jenjira Pongpas, and Tong, a young nephew, played by Sakda Kaewbuadee. A Lao worker, Jaai, dialyses him: a man from across the border tending a man of the province, the bag and the tube part of the household’s ordinary day. The care is plain and daily, and the film gives it the same steady attention it gives the forest.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul wrote and directed the film, suggested by a book by a monk of the region about a man who remembered his past lives, and made it as part of his Primitive project (2009) about Nabua in Isan, where the army suppressed communist insurgents from the mid-1960s. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom photographed it on 16mm, Lee Chatametikool edited it, and Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr made its sound. There is no composed score. It runs about 114 minutes, in Thai and the Isan dialect, and in May 2010 it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the first for a Thai or Southeast Asian film.
Movement II
At dinner, in the dark, with the night insects loud around the table, a woman appears in an empty chair. She fades in, translucent, and is Huay, Boonmee’s dead wife, played by Natthakarn Aphaiwonk. The family looks at her, and goes on eating. There is no shriek and no music: the dead have come to dinner, and the household makes room. From this moment the film’s law is set, and everything after it obeys.
Then a pair of red eyes on the stairs, and the eyes become the son. It is Boonsong, the son the family lost, played by Geerasak Kulhong. He went into the forest after a creature and became one, and has come back as a monkey ghost, to a table that receives him. The figure is a man in a fur suit with red lights for eyes, made as the monster of a Thai matinee, and the film asks its audience to take him as a lost child.
Huay stays. She tends the dying man as a wife would, and the household holds the living and the dead in one routine. The long fixed takes give the ghost the same duration as the living, so her arrival is not an effect but a guest. Boonmee speaks of the communists he killed and of his illness as karma for it, and the private dying and the province’s history meet in a sentence at a table. The film does not open that history further. It lets it sit in the room with the ghosts.
Movement III
By day the farm is bees, tamarind and the forest’s edge, and the film looks at the work and the land with the same evenness it gave the dinner. The labour is a setting more than a subject, and the farm is held as the place a man is leaving rather than the place he works. The forest is always at the frame’s edge, and the forest is where the dead and the hunted have gone.
Then the film leaves Boonmee altogether. A princess with her jewels comes to a waterfall. Lit as an old palace costume picture, she looks into the water and her face is seen in it. A catfish spirit is in the pool, and she gives herself to it. The episode is never fixed to Boonmee. It may be one of his past lives, and the film does not say so.
The episode is the film’s furthest reach from the farm and its strangest height, erotic and absurd at once, and it can be lifted out without the spine of the film breaking. But it shows the method plainly. A life lived in an earlier time appears in the cinema of that time: the costume drama, the television ghost serial, the matinee monster. The past lives are past cinemas, and the despised popular film of Thailand is brought into the art film without irony, at the cost of the charge of whimsy.
Movement IV
A dream of the future is told over still photographs: young soldiers, boys, a world in which those who capture people make the past disappear. The image stops moving when the film shows a future that has stopped. The form borrows from La Jetée (1962), and the stills here are of soldiers in the same hills where the army hunted insurgents. The dream is dread, quiet and lasting, and it states the film’s third truth: memory is what power removes.
At night Boonmee walks through the forest toward a cave. The torch passes over glittering rock, and the walls shine. Boonmee speaks of having been born there. The cave is womb and grave at once, the oldest of places, and he has come into it to die where he believes he began. The archetype is not alluded to: it is walked into, in near darkness, by a dying man.
Boonmee dies in the cave. The photography finds faces in near darkness and rock in torchlight without losing either, and the sound carries the scene as much as the image. It is the summit of the film, and it arrives as stillness rather than transport. Nothing is explained: not which lives were his, not whether the princess was one of them, not what the ghosts will do now. A man has returned to where he was born, and the passage through forms goes on without him.
Movement V
The funeral follows. Then the film moves to the only modern interior it holds, a hotel room in the city. Tong has become a monk, and in his robe he visits Jen there. The robe comes off for a T-shirt, and the monk becomes a young man in town. The register drops to a deadpan that lifts nothing, and the forest is gone. A pop song plays near the end, the one bright surface of modern life the film allows itself.
Jen and Tong leave the room to go to a restaurant. At the same time they remain seated, side by side, before the television, their doubles staying while their selves go out. The film does not mark the split or explain it. The doubling of lives, which the ghosts and the princess and the monkey son have carried in story, is now a matter of the frame. The coda strains the film’s law, and obeys it: forms pass into each other, and a self is not one thing.
Sixteen years on, the film is argued as a Buddhist film about karma, as an animist film of Isan, as a political film about Nabua read beside Primitive, as an essay on cinema’s own ghosts, and as a queer film. It survives whole in a single cut. The questions it opened are still open: whether the princess is Boonmee, what the dream foresees, why the doubles stay. What it made is a cinema in which the dead are present without remark, at the table, in the forest and before the television, given the same light and the same time as the living.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is harder than the film’s calm suggests, because it is built as a sequence of panels rather than a chain. Much is required. The dinner is the hinge: the dead arrive at the table without fuss, and the film’s law is set. The cave is required, since Boonmee’s death must return him to the place he believes he was born. The Lao worker who dialyses a man haunted by the communists he killed is required for the film’s history. What gives is the princess and the catfish, never fixed to Boonmee and standing as a detachable episode; the opening buffalo and the hotel room are looser in their claim than the centre.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Disclosure through image and sound is credited fully. What is brought into the open can be stated: in this province the dead are not gone, and the violence the state did here is not gone either; a man’s dying gathers both, and the film treats a ghost at the table and a killing in the hills as the same kind of fact, present and owed. Boonmee’s sense that his illness is karma for the communists he killed ties private dying to public history without a speech. A second truth lives in daily care between Thai and Lao. Held below the gate because much of the power is mood, and the history is glimpsed in a sentence and a set of photographs rather than opened.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of one kind: calm wonder, sometimes cold. The buffalo pulling free at dusk and walking into the trees, watched by red eyes, rises at once. The dinner is the summit of the first half: Huay fades into her chair, translucent, while the family keeps eating, and then the red eyes on the stairs become the son. The princess at the waterfall, her face seen in the water, has a strange erotic height. The night walk to the cave, a torch on glittering rock, is the summit of the whole. Held below the top because the register is deliberately low, the highs come as stillness rather than transport, and the hotel room lifts nothing.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. Rebirth is the structure: a buffalo, a princess, a man, a ghost, a monk, each perhaps the same life passing through forms, and the film is arranged as a passage through those forms rather than told about them. The cave is womb and grave at once, and Boonmee walks into it to die where he says he was born, so the archetype is enacted. The dead wife who nurses the dying man, the son who went into the forest after a creature and became one, and the princess who gives herself to a catfish are made load-bearing. Held below the top because the reincarnations are left open by design, the chain suggested link by link rather than completed.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is double: the international art cinema of the long take, in which Apichatpong was already a leading name after Blissfully Yours (2002), Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006), and the despised popular Thai cinema of ghosts, costume dramas and television serials. The turn is to marry them without irony. The monkey ghost is a man in a fur suit with red lights for eyes, made as a matinee monster, and the film asks the art audience to take it as a son. The stake was real: ridicule, dismissal as whimsy, and a political history under the eye of the Thai censor. Held below the top because the director’s earlier films had already set him on this path.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that past and present, living and dead, man and animal share one plane and one tempo. The long fixed takes give the ghost and the living the same duration, so Huay’s arrival is not an effect but a guest. Episodes made in older Thai manners make past lives into past cinemas, so form carries reincarnation itself. The dream drops motion when the film shows a future that has stopped. The ending, where Jen and Tong are both seated and leaving, makes doubled lives a matter of the frame. Held below the top because the formal scheme is not wholly legible on the screen, and some episodes read as plain realism rather than a chosen past.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence, not promise, over sixteen years. The film has been argued and returned to as a Buddhist film about karma, as an animist film of Isan, as a political film about Nabua and the suppression of the 1960s, read with the director’s Primitive project, as an essay on cinema’s own ghosts, and as a queer film, with the princess and the catfish. The questions stay open: whether the princess is Boonmee, what the dream means, why the doubles at the end. The form yields on return, in the forest’s sound and the placing of the dead in the frame. Held by span, sixteen years being a short demonstration, and because much of the return is to atmosphere, which renews less than a question does.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 2010, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 2000s and 2010s. The intrinsic force is high: the film made a popular folk cinema of ghosts and an art cinema of duration one language, and showed that a political history could be carried by spirits rather than testimony. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or put Thai and Southeast Asian art cinema at the centre of the festival world, and the film became a reference for the slow, sensory, animist cinema of the next decade, in Thailand, the Philippines and Latin America, and for the meeting of film and gallery. It redirected art cinema rather than cinema, and much of its influence passes through the director’s whole body of work.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across sixteen years. The film survives whole, in a single cut, with no loss or altered version. Its presence is continuous: festivals, retrospectives, home release in several territories and teaching, as one of the most discussed art films of its year; the Palme d’Or keeps it in view, which counts as presence and not as proof. Its surface is not fixed to 2010: a farm and a forest, manners borrowed from older cinemas, and one modern interior at the close. There is no charge on the fabric. Held at the step for sixteen years, and at its foot, because its presence, though steady, is that of a festival film rather than a wide one.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The command is real and load-bearing in sound and light. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s night photography finds faces in near darkness and rock in torchlight without losing either, and the long takes are placed with exact patience. Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr’s sound is the film’s instrument: insects, wind, the hum of the dialysis, the forest as a room, a continuous field into which the ghosts arrive. The non-professional performances are flat by design and held flat, Jenjira Pongpas above all, with a plain warmth. Lee Chatametikool’s editing lets the episodes stand apart and still belong. The costs: the monkey suit and the princess’s artifice yield some shots that look merely cheap, and the finish varies, the hotel room flatter than the nights.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the princess with her jewels at a waterfall, lit as an old palace drama, and Tong in a monk’s robe in a hotel room watching television. One law governs both: a self is not one thing, and forms pass into each other without ceremony. The princess becomes the lover of a catfish; the monk becomes a man in a T-shirt, and is also still seated. The ghosts at dinner, the son become an animal, the dream of a future without memory and the doubles obey the same law, and the even tone that gives a ghost and a dialysis bag one weight is that law applied. The strain: the hotel and the dream belong to it more by argument than by feel.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 114 minutes holds. A dying consciousness, with its memory and guilt; the family, living and dead, in one household; labour, in the tamarind farm, the bees and the Lao worker, a migrant in a borderland; the nation and its violence, in the communists killed and the soldiers of the dream; history, in Nabua and the 1960s; the sacred, in rebirth, ghosts, the cave and the monk; the natural order, in buffalo, forest, insects and catfish, held as kin of the human. These are held through Boonmee, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history enter in a sentence and a set of stills, the city only at the close, and the farm’s labour is a setting more than a subject. The reach is wide in kind and slight in each register.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Living Form at 8.5. A turn that marries the long take of art cinema to the despised Thai cinema of ghosts without irony, at the cost of ridicule; a myth of rebirth built as the structure of the film and enacted in the cave; and a form whose long fixed takes give the dead and the living one duration, and whose episodes in older manners make past lives into past cinemas.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the family, labour, the nation, history, the sacred and the natural order are held through one dying man, but the state and history enter in a sentence and a set of stills, the city only at the close, and the farm’s labour is a setting. Above it, The Inevitable at 7.9, where the princess episode and the hotel coda stand looser than the centre, and The Imperishable at 8.0, sixteen years of steady presence as a festival film rather than a wide one.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Swerve at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall two tenths short and The Imperishable at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.7, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat) as released in 2010, the single cut shown in competition at Cannes in May 2010 and distributed thereafter, about 114 minutes, from the buffalo breaking loose to the doubles before the television: written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, photographed by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom on 16mm, edited by Lee Chatametikool, with sound by Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, and with Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Natthakarn Aphaiwonk and Geerasak Kulhong. No other cut is known, so no version question arises. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the original, in Thai and the Isan dialect; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them a second credit for the photography, the exact gauge, any further language spoken, the name of the monk whose book suggested the film, the number of episodes and the director’s own account of their manners, the title of the pop song near the end, any restoration, and the scene count and shot lengths.