“Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before  me.”—Title card at the beginning of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

DIRECTED BY: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

FEATURING: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Kanokporn Tongaram

PLOT: On his plantation in rural Thailand, the dying Boonmee is visited by living relatives and the ghosts of his past. As they ease him into death, the story is interrupted through vignettes that may represent his memories of past lives.

BACKGROUND:

• Apichatpong Weerasethakul considerately refers to himself as “Joe” when speaking to Western audiences.
• Uncle Boonmee is loosely based on a 1983 book by Phra Sripariyattiweti, a monk from Apichatpong’s hometown of Khon Kaen, Thailand.
• The film is a feature-length component of Primitive, Apichatpong’s ongoing multimedia project, which also encompasses a number of video installations and the short films A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua.
• Received the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Jury president Tim Burton described it as “a beautiful, strange dream.”
• Sakda, who plays Boonmee’s nephew Tong, and Kanokporn, who plays his nurse Roong, played characters of the same names in Apichatpong’s earlier films Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours, respectively. In both cases, it’s unclear if they’re meant to be the same characters.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Though it’s chock-full of beguiling, whimsical imagery, the single most memorable sight in Uncle Boonmee is that of a princess in a lagoon, undulating with pleasure as she receives oral sex from a catfish. (Unsurprisingly, the words “catfish sex” became synonymous with Uncle Boonmee‘s brand of weirdness immediately following its Cannes premiere.)

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Critics sometimes identify Apichatpong’s style as a mix of

Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

surrealism and neorealism, and this is a handy skeleton key for getting at Uncle Boonmee‘s weird nature. The film contains plenty of enigmatic images and seeming non sequiturs, but they’re framed as natural, even welcome steps in the cycle of life and death. The characters accept them nonchalantly, going along with the film’s dream logic and implicitly entreating viewers to do the same. No clear border separates the mystical from the mundane. And two hours in, when it feels like you should be totally inured to Uncle Boonmee‘s disorienting twists, along comes a denouement that renders everything else normal by comparison.

COMMENTS: An ox, having escaped its tether, strolls through the forest at twilight.  Eventually, its human owner retrieves it.  Then a large, hairy primate with glowing red eyes comes onscreen and stares straight into the camera.  This is how Uncle Boonmee opens: wordless, tantalizing, with a relaxed pace and exquisite lighting.  No explanation, no exposition, no cinematic shorthand.  Just an ox, its master, and a “monkey ghost”—an omnipresent cryptid invented by Apichatpong, but “inspired by folk tales.”  It’s entrancing.  Or, if you like your narratives linear, it’s frustratingly opaque.

It’s an ideal “weird movie” litmus test.  If, to quote A Serious Man, you can “accept the mystery,” then Uncle Boonmee might be the movie for you.  As you can glean from the opening, the film’s story develops primarily by implication and ellipsis.  Maybe that ox could be Uncle Boonmee in one of his past lives.  Maybe Apichatpong’s saying something about nature’s willfulness, its eternal desire to roam free.  Maybe the monkey ghost is an omen, or a signifier of pervasive magic, or a link between the past and present.  Uncle Boonmee never holds your hand, but neither does it force you to think.  Instead, it forces you to intuit, to caress its wonderfully tactile surfaces and follow your instincts.

As the film shifts into the present day, it becomes more concrete.  We’re introduced to Boonmee, his Burmese caretaker Roong, his matronly sister-in-law Jen, and her son Tong.  They joke, they eat, they discuss Boonmee’s kidney ailment; they have the casual but slightly awkward interactions you’d expect between relatives anticipating a death in the family.  Apichatpong lets conversations and medical procedures play out in long, static, meticulously composed shots.  It’s all so quotidian, yet hypnotically cinematic.  Sonically nestled in the hum of crickets, these scenes acclimate us to Uncle Boonmee‘s magical reality.  It’s warm, inviting, and full of surprises.

Like, for example, a scene where dinner table small talk is interrupted by the ghost of Boonmee’s wife Huay.  At first, the characters recoil. Then they engage with her.  They instantly accept that the boundaries between life and death are permeable, especially now that Boonmee’s health is ebbing away.  This reaction plays as absurdist comedy, but also as spiritual sophistication, and this overlap gets at the film’s light-hearted attitude toward the afterlife.  “Heaven is overrated,” says Huay while embracing Boonmee.  “There’s nothing there.”  All of the performances are so deadpan, so unburdened by ego or affectation, that these traces of humor don’t feel glib or self-satisfied.  They just feel like consistent manifestations of the film’s philosophical outlook.

For all its weighty subject matter, Uncle Boonmee never grows serious.  It meanders along through Boonmee’s last days with an eye for sublime visual detail: the gray-green hue of the evening sky, or the chalky cave where the characters mysteriously travel as Boonmee fades away from life.  It also takes a pair of inscrutable, fantastic detours: first to the past, for the tale of the princess and the catfish, then to a dream of the future told through still images, in homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée.  Throughout these chapters (and the grand finale that follows Boonmee’s death), the film traffics in everything but absolutes.  It’s playful and unpredictable, dispensing options and suggestions like narrative candy.  It’s not a puzzle box, but a cornucopia of mysteries. In its subdued way, it’s among the weirdest movies in history.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a special taste, dreamlike and sometimes opaque, or at least translucent, to logical analysis.”–Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal (contemporaneous)

“…a total wonderwork: enchanting, bizarre, complex, original.”–Nigel Andrews, Financial Times (contemporaneous)

“Fascinating, hypnotic and deeply, deeply weird… a beautifully shot Thai drama that will baffle and amaze in equal measure.”–Matthew Turner, View London (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Uncle Boonmee at Strand Releasing  – There’s little on Strand Releasing’s Uncle Boonmee page other than a few stills and the surprisingly hard-to-find US release trailer

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (German) – If you can read German, there’s much information to be gleaned about Uncle Boonmee here

IMDB LINK: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Guest Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – Guest reviewer Kevyn Knox’s original Uncle Boonmee rave for this site

Uncle Boonmee Pressbook – The strange and gorgeous English-language pressbook for the film (.pdf)

Video Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Intensive four part videotaped interview with “Joe” with journalist Louis Danvers for the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels; here are parts 2, 3 and 4

Uncle Boonmee: Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Virginie Sélavy of Electric Sheep interviews “Joe”

The late, great Apichatpong – Boonmee-focused profile of the director from the English-language Thai newspaper The Nation

DVD INFO: Uncle Boonmee has received a gorgeous DVD treatment from Strand Releasing (buy). In addition to a host of art house trailers, its special features include an interview with the affable Apichatpong and half an hour of deleted scenes. The film is also available on Blu-ray
(buy) and (at the time of this writing) on Netflix Watch Instantly.

FEATURING: Linda Hardy, Thomas Kretschmann, Thomas M. Pollard (voice), Charlotte Rampling

PLOT: The Egyptian god Horus shows up in a pyramid floating above Manhattan in 2095 and

possesses the thawed body of a cryogenically frozen political prisoner to search for a blue haired woman.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It might make the List for the outrageous premise mixing Egyptian mythology and futurist fiction, for the bizarre mingling of live actors with CG characters, and for the confusing storyline which makes the entire film seem like it might be a pagan god’s bad dream after having eaten a tainted planet for a midnight snack.

COMMENTS: The visual ambition of Immortal sometimes surpasses its budget, but it’s always beautifully designed; take the vision of a blue haired pixie women balancing on a girder as she ambles through a cityscape of gray steel art deco skyscrapers.  Immortal‘s Manhattan is a wondrously vertical place of soaring buildings, flying cars, and floating billboards.  No matter how attractive the digital backdrops, though, the watcher is likely to be taken aback by the fact that almost everyone on the screen looks like an animated avatar from the “Final Fantasy” video game series.  You might expect to see computer generated figures portraying the aliens, mutants and ancient Egyptian gods that populate Immortal‘s world, but most of the major human players are completely animated, while the occasional disposable extra of no importance is played by a real live actor.  Charlotte Rampling‘s meddling doctor (with a hairdo made from melted black plastic) is no more important to the tale than a police inspector searching for what he believes to be a serial killer, but one is animated and the other isn’t; it’s disconcerting when they perform scenes opposite each other.  The limited emoting ability of computer-generated images makes them fairly creepy when they’re among their own kind; putting them next to real people highlights their uncanny plastic imperfections.  The seemingly arbitrary decision to animate some characters and use actors for others makes for a strange atmosphere, whether that was the intention or not.  Not that this scenario of an ancient god hunting for a woman through a futuristic city needed much strangening up.  The movie begins with the appearance of a giant pyramid floating in the sky, but no one in town pays it too much attention: this is the Big Apple, where everybody minds their own business.  Besides, New Yorkers in 2095 are jaded to mysterious apparitions: for several months, Central Park has been taken over by an unexplained extra-dimensional “incursion” that’s turned it into an arctic wasteland.  This teeming city is the perfect place for a guy like the falcon-headed god Horus to go about his business of searching for a mate without attracting too much attention.  Along the journey we’re treated to numerous odd touches: Horus’ fellow gods playing parlor games as they wait for him back at the pyramid; red hammerheaded aliens who swim through the skies; scenes shot in blurry, druggy “Jill-vision”; and half-explored subplots about political intrigues and the sinister role of the omnipresent Eugenics corporation in future society.  We are thrust into Bilal’s imaginary world with no explanations, and it takes a first act of near total confusion before we can start to get our bearings on the setting and the story.  “It’s almost like in one of those Greek tragedies… all of the elements will fall into place,” promises one character, whose reason for appearing in Immortal (Ad Vitam), ironically, never becomes absolutely clear.  All of the elements never fall into place—just who was John, anyway?—but I’m guessing if you’re intrigued by the idea of an amoral bird-headed deity stalking the streets of a moody computer-generated metropolis, the trippy sci-fi experience is going to outweigh your need for closure on a few loose plot ends.

Much of the look Enki Bilal creates for Immortal is reminiscent of the imaginary world fellow French national Luc Besson created for The Fifth Element, from its junky flying taxis to the mysterious, hot, semi-divine pixie-woman at the center of the story.  The somber tone is very different, however, and Immortal remains a unique world despite its influences (Blade Runner is another obvious touchstone).  Bilal adapted the story from his own graphic novels, and the setting is clearly rich, with much more background detail than can be revealed in Immortal‘s 90 minute run time.  The more thorough, trilogy-length treatment of this unique universe given in the novels would undoubtedly make more sense, but probably be less appealing to lovers of weird movies.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…dreamy, slightly weird, stylish French sci-fi movie… Flawed but good.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Lili.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul (now there are a couple of mouthfuls-and-a-half) is certainly not a film (or filmmaker) for everyone, but if you happen to be one of the lucky ones who can appreciate this dissident director’s young, but deeply-seeded oeuvre, then you will most certainly like this latest film by the man affectionately called ‘Joe.’  Perhaps the director’s best, most fluid work yet, matching or perhaps even surpassing his esoteric treatise on love, Tropical Malady, and his most heralded work, the subtly sublime Syndromes and a Century, Uncle Boonmee (as we will shorten it from here on out) is a grand fable that not only incorporates the folktales we have come to expect from this director, but also the personal and political concerns that have also become a staple for good ole ‘Joe’.

Keeping with tradition (traditions of Thai folklore and of Apichatpong’s stream-of-consciousness works) we get the story of a dying man who is reunited with his family—both living, dead (and in-between)—and the rituals and rites that come with both living and dying (and in-between). We also get, again keeping with tradition, an otherworldly tale that involves mysterious, red-eyed Sasquatchian creatures roaming the jungles of Thailand.  The cinematic works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul can be alluded to (though by no means explained or defined) by the paraphrasing of a cherished Hollywood classic—talking monkeys and tigers and bears, oh my.  The filmmaker’s style of sociopolitical (and oft-times autobiographical) movie making, with his slow, wandering camera, lazily weaving between reality and fantasy as easily as between rural and urban or modern and classic or male and female, and his non-preachy philosophizing—a style that the auteur has captured and made his own—is in top form in Uncle Boonmee.

Basically (and the story is subversively basic, or primal, if you will) this is the story of the titular uncle, who finds himself dying and invites his sister-in-law and nephew to spend his final days together on his jungle farm. Shortly thereafter, the ghost of Boonmee’s dead wife shows up to help him get through his illness; shortly after that, Boonmee’s long-lost son returns, in the aforementioned Sasquatchian form (the director calls these creatures ‘Monkey Ghosts’). The film gets even weirder from here on in—wonderfully weirder, that is. It was the first appearance of these ominous monkey ghosts, shortly into the film, that sealed the proverbial deal for this critic. After all this, we join Boonmee in what may be his final moments (or may not) deep inside a cave that seems to be the darkened womb of Weerasethakul’s storytelling. A definite mythmaker, Apichatpong, with his unnatural naturalness wholly intact, has managed to deepen my already heartfelt love for his work.

In my initial look at the succulent Uncle Boonmee (written just after viewing the film at last year’s New York Film Festival), I said this of the film: “The proof in the pudding, so to speak, of the mystical quality of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema, is when you can introduce a talking catfish into the middle of your story (in a seemingly unrelated episode to the rest of the film) and have him ‘pleasure’ a young melancholy princess beneath a beautiful waterfall, and never once does it seem out of place or extraordinary; merely a natural extension of the director’s mythmaking style of filmmaking. When von Trier had his ravenous fox growl out “chaos reigns” in Antichrist, it was meant to be as antagonistic as the filmmaker himself. In Uncle Boonmee, Apichatpong makes it seem like just a natural thing that happens all the time. A talking catfish that goes down on a princess? Sure, why the Hell not.” And I still agree all these months later—why the Hell not.

DIRECTED BY: E. Elias Merhige

FEATURING: Actors from the experimental theater group Theater of Material

PLOT:  A man sitting in a chair disembowels himself with a straight razor.  A woman materializes from underneath his bloody robes, and impregnates herself with fluid taken from the dead body.  She gives birth to a convulsing, full grown man, and mother and son are then seized and tortured by four hooded figures bearing ceremonial implements.

BACKGROUND:

• Each frame of film was painstakingly manipulated to create the distressed chiaroscuro universe of the movie.  According to the technical production notes, after the raw footage was shot, “…optimum exposure and filtration were determined, the footage was then re-photographed one frame at a time… it took over ten hours to re-photograph less than one minute of selected takes.”
• It has been reported that the film was inspired by a near death experience the Merhige had after an automobile accident.
• Critics from Time, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Newsday each named Begotten one of the ten best films of 1991.  Novelist and photographer Susan Sontag called it one of the ten best films of modern times.
• After Begotten, Merhige went on to direct the music video “Cryptorchid” for Marilyn Manson (which reused footage from Begotten) before landing a major feature, Shadow of the Vampire (2000)–a horror film about the making of Nosferatu, starring Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck and John Malkovich as Murnau.
• Begotten is intended as part of a trilogy of films.  A second film, Din of Celestial Birds, which deals with the idea of evolution rather than creation, has been released in a 14 minute version that is intended as a prologue to the second installment.
• After its brief run in specialty arts theaters, including stints at the Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian, Begotten received a very limited video release, first on VHS and then on DVD.  Merhige explains that this is because he does not believe that these formats are truly capable of reproducing the look he intended for the film:
  

  There are so many arcane, deeply intentional uses of grain, light and dark in that film that it is closer to Rosicrucian manuscript on the origin of matter than it is to being a “movie”…. When I finished the film I never allowed it to be screened on video because of how delicately layered and important the image is in conveying the deeper mystery of what the film is “about”… this is why it is no longer available on DVD until I find a digital format that is capable of capturing the soul and intent of the film.  My experiments in BluRay have been promising.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The painfully graphic image of “God disemboweling Himself” with a straight razor–shot in the grainy, high-contrast black and white–is not easily forgotten.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  A minimalist, mythic narrative of grotesque, ritualized suffering

Original trailer for Begotten

enshrouded in astonishing abstract avant-garde visuals and a hypnotic ambient soundtrack.  Love it, hate it, or admire the technique while criticizing the intent—everyone admits there is nothing else quite like it in our cinematic universe.

COMMENTS:  Begotten is a difficult film to rate.  It does not set out to entertain, and it does not entertain.  There is no dialogue, and no real story in any traditional sense; the loose tale of cosmic death and rebirth is a dim impression of a plot.  There are characters, of a sort, but without reading the end credits or hearing a synopsis, one would be hard pressed to identify them as gods of creation.  The images are relentless, simultaneously beautiful and very, very disturbing: the film lingers lovingly over abstract but graphic scenes of symbolic gang rape, torture and atrocity.  Begotten is an experiment in film, and the act of watching it needs to be approached as an experiment in viewing.

Many viewers dismiss Begotten as pretentious, sadistic trash, and it’s easy to understand their position.  On the purely textual level—what “happens” in the movie—the film could be seen as an existential snuff film.  Both male and female genitalia are put on graphic display, although they are hardly shot to erotic effect, as they are often difficult to recognize through the grain and haze of the film.  More importantly, hardly a minute passes without depicting some form of excruciating pain, from God’s self-disembowelment to the ceremonial rape of Mother Earth to the seeming endless tortures the ever-quivering “Flesh-on-Bone” endures at the hands of the cowled figures.  (Admittedly, it’s hard to say with metaphysical certainty that these godlike figures actually “suffer” without projecting our own human feelings onto them.  Flesh-on-Bone, in particular, seems to be in the grips of a perpetual epileptic fit from birth, so the convulsive jerking of his limbs as he’s dragged about a forest by a length of rope tied around his neck may or may not be a pain reaction).

These scenes would be banal and pornographic if they had been filmed by a static camera, without any sort of artistic transformation.  But what gives Begotten its staying power is its unique look.  Every frame in the film was transformed in post-production: the black and white contrasts were turned up to 11, and flickering, pulsing light effects were added.  These efforts turned the finished, reconstituted images into something abstract and mysterious.  The effect is like looking at a world that’s been wrapped in wet newspaper, or watching a series of faded, archival crime scene pictures stitched together to make a film.  The visual transformations are utterly unique.  And, the grotesque images of suffering are alternated with images of aching natural beauty: moonrises, a black bird flapping across the sky, sunlight streaming through the rushes.  At times, the picture becomes so scrambled that it can be difficult to make out what’s “actually” appearing on the screen, which adds to the movie’s dreamlike effect.  Even the film’s harshest critics would be hard pressed to deny that, at least on the technical level, the film brings something original, impressive, and praiseworthy into existence.

Begotten is not a photographic experiment, but a motion picture, and the weird effect doesn’t result from a series of static images alone, but also from the way the pictures interact with each other on the screen.  Images flicker and pulse, shadows grow in the background.  The Begotten universe is in ceaseless motion, a constant, unfinished state of becoming: it’s most definitely Somewhere Else.  The “flicker effect” was deliberately intended by Merhige to try to induce an altered state of consciousness in the viewer; to resonate with the slower brainwave rhythms in an attempt to bypass the conscious mind and speak to the deeper, pre-lingual and pre-rational parts of the brain.  The soundtrack is an indispensable aid in achieving the desired trancelike effect.  It consists of a very small palette of repetitive sounds—the chirp of a cricket, a heartbeat, gurgling, the crackle of a campfire—which are looped throughout the soundtrack in various overlapping rhythms.  Merhige has called the Begotten endeavor an attempt to found a “genre of the Unconscious.”

Begotten can have a sort of hypnotic effect on the viewer, as long as he is willing to participate and play along with it.  As with all forms of hypnosis, it only works with a willing, receptive subject.  Watching the film for a second time while composing this review, I found my mind wandering into meditative reveries that were only lightly inspired by the visions witnessed by my eyes, occasionally drawn back into the movie by some broad shift of scene or action on my television screen.  Because we are watching archetypal figures engaging in obscure rituals in a visually alien landscape, with no plot to guide us, our minds have to find something to do to fill in the gaps in the experience.

Of course, the “wandering mind” effect results as much from the minimal narrative as it does from the hypnotic audiovisual technique.  Probably the most common, and most sympathetic, complaint from viewers who are willing to give Begotten a chance is that the film is intoxicating at first, but becomes boring after fifteen or twenty minutes have passed.  It can be quite a chore to stay in Begotten’s unconscious world for as long as Merhige asks us of us.  That may be a fault of the impatient viewer who is unable to shut off his rational mind and let the film flow through him, but interest followed by boredom is such a predictable reaction to Begotten that it would be irresponsible not to mention it.  Perhaps our short attention spans are to blame, or perhaps waking human brain hasn’t evolved to remain awake in such an extreme oneiric state for an hour at a stretch.  Perhaps the experience is quite different and more effective when the film is projected in a theater. (I think the optimal way to view the film may be lying prone, on a dose of mild painkillers, while recuperating from minor surgery). At any rate, many people suggest, myself among them, that Begotten would have had far more impact at about a quarter or a third of the current length, and perhaps even ranked as an undisputed classic rather than an intriguing, partly successful experiment.

Of course, as with any truly weird film, many will dismiss it as worthless and pretentious merely because it’s irrational.  Others will assume that, because the film made an impression on them, the irrationality must be a code for some deep, esoteric but ultimately rational meaning.  The inspiration for the action of Begotten is a private creation myth that taps into universal religious archetypes.  The goddess impregnating herself with the seed of a dead god brings to mind Isis conceiving Horus by mating with the corpse of Osiris; and it may be difficult not to associate the sufferings of Son of Earth (Flesh-on-Bone) with the sufferings of the Christian Son of God.  Merhige has at least partially encouraged the Gnostics in his fan base with the copious chapter titles on the DVD release (over fifty of them), which almost read like a concordance to a religious text.  These chapter titles, each associated with a 30 to 90 second segment of the film, make Biblical references to “the Alpha and the Omega” and to primeval locations such as Eden and the Land of Nod, and bear titles such as “Do not Weep.  I shall draw all Things Which perish into myself When I am lifted from the Earth.”  This suggests that some sort of mystical interpretation can be gleaned from a close study of the “text” of the film–which I doubt is the case.

I believe, rather, that the “meaning” of the film is contained in the moving image itself; the experience of the film is itself what it is “about.”  To reduce Begotten from image to language would be a mistake.  The film begins with an incantation rebuking the “language makers”: “you, with your memory, are dead, frozen.” It immediately invokes a different sort of language, “the incantation of matter.”  If the author could have expressed his intended meaning in a poem or a paragraph, he would have written a poem or a paragraph, rather than going to the difficulty of making a movie.  The simple and elegant idea the film explores is that creation (of matter, and also of art) involves a mix of suffering and beauty, death and re-birth.  This inspiration is more a portal of entry into a new, ineffable universe, however, than it is an end result.  Some of Merhige’s implications, such as his suggestion that the film is somehow self-aware, elude me.  But what it is clear that the film is not reducible to the events which take place onscreen; it speaks to the unconscious, and it’s perfectly acceptable for the message to vary from person to person.  As Merhige himself put it in his 2008 article for movieScope:

…I ask you to look at my first film Begotten, not as a narrative made up of characters, but as a drama of forces there to awaken an essential part of our being.  It is the very stuff of our origin where language fails, and for lack of a better word, the unconscious begins.

Whether, how deeply, and for how long you will drawn into Begotten’s unique universe is unknowable.  All I can say is that, even if you do not have a pleasant time there, the trip is worth taking; and a journey to Begotten’s realms is a mandatory pilgrimage for fans of truly weird cinema.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Nobody will get through BEGOTTEN without being marked… each image is a seductive mystery, a Rorschach test for the adventurous eye.”–Richard Corliss, Time (contemporaneous)

“…considerably less intoxicating in effect than it is in theory… seems almost entirely self-contained, with little effort to engage an audience on even the level of myth; the film’s approach is far too grotesque for that. The experience of watching “Begotten” can best be characterized as intense. “–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Evok[es] Alexander Sokurov and Francis Bacon as well as early David Lynch and a great many splatter films… if you’re looking to be freaked out you shouldn’t pass it up.”–Johnathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader

IMDB LINK: Begotten (1990)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

“The Dark Soul of Cinema: An Apology Towards a Genre of the ‘Unconcious’,” in movieScope Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 6 2008 – A fascinating description of the origin of and philosophy behind the movie from the writer/director’s own pen

Christian Cinema at The Vagrant Cafe – A very insightful essay about Begotten from a Christian perspective

DVD INFO: The limited World Artists DVD release is long out of print, and collectible copies go for anywhere from $75 to $250 dollars.  The DVD package contained a souvenir booklet.  The DVD itself is somewhat sparse on extras but includes the trailer, stills, and production notes.  Oddly, the film is presented in full frame [1.33:1] rather than a widescreen.

As mentioned in the “Background”  section, Merhige is unhappy with the ability of the DVD format to reproduce the look 0f the film.   We hold out hopes that a Blu Ray disc will be forthcoming.

A rental copy of this film was obtained from Wild and Wooly video in Louisville, KY, a fantastic source for obscure and out-of-print videos for people in the region.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Jeff.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

FEATURING: Alice Krige, Shelley Duvall, Frank Gorshin

PLOT: A prisoner returns to his childhood home on an ostrich farm in a

mythical northern land during the constant daylight of the summer season, where he becomes involved with two mysterious women.

WHY IT  WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is plenty weird enough to make the List, although it can be such slow going that many folks will tune out before discovering it’s weirder points.  Twilight just isn’t good enough.  With several of director Guy Maddin’s more effective films already slated for inclusion, it makes little sense to allow a lesser effort, weird though it may well be, to take space away from a more deserving contender.

COMMENTS:  Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is set in a suitably colorful and mythic locale, an imaginary land with Nordic overtones and ostriches, but it’s dragged down by an uninspiring hero in an uninvolving storyline, ponderous dialogue, and uneven acting.  The protagonist, Peter (Nigel Whitmey), is subject to bouts of sleep-hunting, and also, it seems, to episodes of sleep-acting.  For most of the movie his emotional range is so low-key that it barely registers: he covers a scale from glum to mildly perturbed.  It doesn’t help that Whitmey’s dialogue was dubbed in by a different actor in post-production after what Maddin hints was a very nasty incident between the director and actor.  Peter strikes up no real chemistry with either of his potential lovers, Juliana (whose personal history is obscure) and Zephyr (a wandering woman three months pregnant with her lost husband’s child), so there is little for the audience to root for in this three-way romance.  Besides Peter, Pascale Bussières as Juliana is cute but forgettable, Alice Krige’s performance as Zephyr seems on loan from a BBC teleplay, and R.H. Thompson’s evil Dr. Solti is little more than a distracting, hammy faux-Russian accent.  Veteran movie actors Shelley Duvall and former Riddler Frank Gorshin put the others to shame, but unfortunately they are pushed into a background subplot.

That said, the film’s visual sensibilities are truly wondrous.  Maddin built his magical fairy-forest inside a Winnipeg warehouse, maintaining meticulous control over every aspect of his mise-en-scene.  Particularly noteworthy are his brash color schemes: he uses “jewel tones” throughout, and seems particularly fond of placing surrounding emerald hues with bright pinks, magentas, and tangerines, as in a sunset setting over a forest canopy.  This makes the movie effective as a slide-show of gorgeous stills; Twilight would probably work well on a big screen TV with the sound turned off as visual wallpaper for a hoity-toity wine-and-cheese party.

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is available on the DVD, “The Guy Maddin Collection” (buy), along with the feature film Archangel and the award-winning short The Heart of the World.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Maddin’s fictional world is… so infused with such a delightful weirdness, such a disorienting, overwrought absurdity, that its artificiality and peculiarity give it a marvelous flavor that is a real pleasure to savor.” -Keith Allen, movierapture.com