Uncle Boonmee Can Recall His Past Lives is the sweetly nutty title of the Thai film that took the Palme d’Or at Cannes last weekend.
The film – directed by Apicatpong Weerasethakul – is as strange as its name, drawing from an old Buddhist fable.
The titular Uncle Boonmee is undergoing dialysis and retires to be with his family in the forests of north-east Thailand. There he encounters the ghost of his wife and any number of strange apparitions that at first seem like childish monsters, but manage to be both funny and meaningful in creating a unique spiritual universe.
Uncle Boonmee picked up the top prize what was generally felt to be a particularly poor Cannes vintage. Nothing else really stood out, and nothing had ‘Palme d’Or’ written all over it as the festival’s 12 days progressed.
The highest rated film among the critics during the festival was Mike Leigh’s Another Year, but it came away with none of the eight prizes awarded by the jury, presided over by Tim Burton.
Still, the films that did receive gongs all had merit and came from very diverse origins.
Second prize went to Of Gods and Men by Xavier Beauvois, adapted from the true story of Cistercian monks in a monastery in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains in the 1990s during the government and Islamist conflict.
Meanwhile, the director’s prize was taken by another French filmmaker, Mathieu Amalric, for his account of a touring burlesque review, On Tour.
The good news from Africa was that A Screaming Man by Mahamet-Saleh Haroun took the jury prize.
From Chad, the film centres on Adam, a sixty-something lifeguard in a posh N’Djamena hotel, nicknamed ‘Champ’ because of his former swimming glories. The film moves at a leisurely pace, exposing dilemmas on familial and political levels.
South Korea celebrated the prize for best screenplay for Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, an excellent story of a stunning sixty-five-year-old sleuth with Alzheimer’s who sets about resolving the suicide of a teenage girl who attended her grandson’s school.
Actors’ prizes were shared by Javier Bardem – for Biutiful, a story of death in a leaden-skied Barcelona made by Mexican director Alejandro González Inárritu – and the Italian Elio Germano for Our Life. The best actress prize went to Juliette Binoche for her role in Certified Copy by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, his first non-Persian language film.
So despite this year’s poor crop overall, Le festival de Cannes’ reputation for cultural diversity is solidly intact.
Séamas McSwiney is an Irish film journalist based in France
