March 8, 2008
"Many books say "death is relaxing". Did you know that? No need to follow the latest trends. No need to keep pace
with the rest of the world. No more e-mail. No more telephone. It'll be like taking a nap... Before waking up refreshed and ready to begin your next life. That's w...( read more)hat they say."
From David Lean's Brief Encounter to Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris to Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, the chance meeting of strangers and the subsequent relationship they develop within a limited timeframe has long served as a fruitful filmic subject. There's something inherently tragic about the idea of romance cut short by the powers of fate, whether in the form of death, insuperable social taboo, or simply a planned relocation, as in the case of Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang's terrific fourth feature, Last Life in the Universe.
One of the first images we see in the film is a pile of books scattered across the floor, with a slipper on top. As the camera slowly inclines upward, we see a man's feet, with one slipper on, and then his legs hanging above the books. "My name is Kenji", a voice says over the soundtrack, "This could be me three hours from now. Why do I want to kill myself?" he muses, "I don't know. I wouldn't kill myself for the same reasons as other suicidal people. Money problems. Broken heart. Hopelessness. No, not me".
This is clearly a fantasy sequence, complete with two acquaintances of Kenji's entering the room and one fainting at the sight of his lifeless body hanging from the ceiling. But a moment later, we see the real-life Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) standing atop a neatly stacked pile of books with a noose around his neck. He's about to kill himself when he's interrupted by the doorbell. It's his gangster brother, who laughs upon noticing that Kenji was about to attempt suicide, an apparently routine recurrence. He hands Kenji a six-pack of Heineken, which Kenji immediately stocks, labels-forward, in his fridge, a character gesture that matches the clean order of his austerely decorated apartment (dozens of stacks of books and DVDs, and not much else line the walls of Kenji's living quarters).
This scene is an early example of Ratanaruang's rather mordant sense of deadpan humor. Perhaps the funniest and certainly one of the most brilliant comes a little later, when one character says to another that he watches too many yakuza films just before Ratanaruang, with a quick meta wink, cuts abruptly to a poster of Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer, featuring Asano's image; Miike himself even turns up in the film, in a small part as a yakuza boss.
Kenji works as a librarian at a Japanese cultural center in Bangkok. He has attempted to shut himself off from the chaos of the outside world, but things soon spiral out of control when his brother is killed while visiting his apartment and - out of self-defense, not revenge - Kenji shoots the man who's just murdered his brother. He leaves his apartment as it's beginning to stink from the rot of the two corpses, and is about to jump off a highway bridge, when, once again, his suicide attempt is interrupted - this time by a traffic accident. Following the accident, Kenji strikes up a sort-of-relationship with Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak), the sister of the young girl whose sudden, gruesome and masterfully shot death he witnessed just as he was about to take his own life.
It's obvious, at once, that Noi is Kenji's polar opposite. She's beautiful, but moody and mercurial, and her place is an authentic pig-house, cluttered and surely infested with god-knows-what, dirty dishes piled about a foot above the sink. Nevertheless, Kenji takes it up on himself to move in with her, and, somewhat reluctantly, Noi allows him to stay - much to her abusive boyfriend's responsibility. She's teaching herself Japanese as she plans soon (as in, next Monday) on moving to Osaka, but hasn't mastered the language to the point where she can speak fluently with Kenji, who himself struggles with Thai. So, they converse mostly in broken English as their relationship, marked by a mutual sense of isolation and subtle sparks of romance, gradually takes shape.
Writer-director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is a self-admitted fan of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki, and he shares some of their preoccupations, such as wryly downplaying the language differences of his characters and showing more interest in household detail than any drama going on outside. The film also reminds me of Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There?, with its parallels, connections, and criss-crossing cultures. Some critics have also compared the film to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, in which a mismatched pair of travellers find each other in a cloud of melancholy. There's truth and untruth about that. Lost in Translation uncovers little bits of truth about people, and Coppola lets her characters - and her story - drift delicately through indistinct thoughts and honest emotions. Ratanaruang doesn't, he orchestrates his characters to attract or repel each other like magnets, adjusting the angles to arrive at an optimally clever conclusion.
Visually speaking, Last Life in the Universe is a little piece of perfection. Ratanaruang and master cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's longtime DP of choice and one of the finest working in cinema today) partner together to supply this offbeat love story with an appropriately dreamy visual design. (Both would work together again in Invisible Waves). If Doyle's photography, gorgeous as always, inadvertently calls to mind his past work on films like Wong's Happy Together and Chungking Express and Chen Kaige's Temptress Moon in its expressive use of light and spatial distance, Ratanaruang's haunting rhythms and idiosyncratic stylistic sense make Last Life a strikingly fresh trip down what may seem a well-worn path.
Doyle's camera glides through Noi's house, and at one point household objects hang in mid-air, recalling the swirling vortex of leaves in Hero. This sort of moody visual poetry is the highlight of a film whose pleasures come not from peace and understanding, and not even from observing human foibles, but from watching a lizard on an apartment and such scenes. The performances are spot-on (with great chemistry between Asano and Boonyasak), the ample humor is gentle and dark, and the guns and gangsters are thankfully minor. Ratanaruang's playful flourishes are exciting - he swaps actresses late in the game, experiments with dream-vs-reality, and shows his opening title some 30 minutes into the film.
One bizarre sequence, in particular, (it could be a dream or fantasy, a stoned hallucination, or just a neat time-lapse trick - and those who've seen the film, I imagine, know exactly which scene it is I'm talking about), is altogether unlike just about anything I've seen on screen before. In its ambiguity and eerie otherworldliness, it serves to epitomize the tone that Ratanaruang successfully sustains throughout the film - and that will very likely continue to stick with you hours, even days after viewing it. Just like the film itself.
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