'Uncle Boonmee' recalls past lives

The critical acclaim for "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" -- which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year for Apichatpong Weerasethakul (or "Joe," as per the Thai penchant for monosyllabic nicknames) -- is encouraging. It advances a filmmaker of distinct vision and it celebrates a film not in patronizing lockstep with the idea that audiences need film to lap over them like a warm bath.

Some of the attention has been about all the attention paid to a cryptically elusive film -- which is precisely what "Uncle Boonmee" is not. It's far more lucid than, say, "Inception," although that may not be the best example of clarity.

The only explosions in "Uncle Boonmee" are cosmic, but it's both a very funny film and one that leaves the viewer with a sense of having been somewhere and seen something -- and felt something, via Weerasethakul's fording of the river between nature and man, and the living and the dead. The gentle Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is suffering from kidney failure; a Lao refugee, Jaai (Samud Kundasang), performs at-home dialysis while Boonmee's sister-in-law, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), voices her fear of illegal aliens.

Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) arrives to cook for Boonmee, who is also joined one night by his dead wife (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk) and son, Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), who looks like the Wolfman. "I want to recognize you but I can't," Boonmee tells Boonsong, indicating that not all transitions to the afterlife are seamless -- Boonmee, after all, is concerned about his own karma. "I killed a lot of Communists," he tells Jen. "I also killed a lot of bugs on the farm." It's a Buddhist joke, one of many that inform "Uncle Boonmee," a film that exhibits no shortage of humanity in the midst of its spiritual bridge building.