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REVIEW: Last Life in the Universe |
 Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's latest film unfurls its characters' inner lives the way cigarette smoke reveals the secret shape of breathing — through a slow-burning, bitter beauty. An unlikely love story about an Asian odd couple, Last Life in the Universe flirts with familiar conventions: the opposites-attract screwball-comedy, the violent poetry of yakuza-flick shootouts, rescue fantasies, cultural malapropisms. But with the aid of famed cinematographer Christopher Doyle, (Hero, In the Mood for Love), Ratanaruang upends expectations, leaves us disoriented, and then shows us what he's really after: a narrative that makes innermost thoughts manifest on the screen, a dream rendered with open eyes.
Ratanaruang starts his cinematic sleight of hand from the beginning — is the first shot real or fantasy? We meet the emotionally deadened librarian Kenji (Japanese superstar Asano Tadanobu) in his immaculate apartment, done up in cool blues and shadows. Rather, we meet his feet, which are dangling over a sprawl of books. "This could be me in three hours," he says in voiceover, before the camera cuts to him tying a noose and affixing a Post-It note reading, "This is bliss" to his hand. He perches on top of his books, preparing to take flight . . . and then his front-door buzzer starts blaring.
Suicidus interruptus. Kenji's death wish is continually confounded by alarms, bells, the hell that is other people. None of his mortality aids — the gun stuffed in a teddy bear, the crushing wheels of a car — work. For Kenji, faux suicide is Mishima-esque performance art, existential ennui and a habitual tic rolled into one, the sort of thing that compels him to label his outfits by day and line up beer cans. Unfortunately, as much as he tries, he can't bring himself off. Then, in a bit of black-hearted irony, everyone else around him starts dying.
Kenji takes up with Noi (the volcanic yet vulnerable Sinitta Boonyasak) after one of these bloody convulsions, a traffic accident that leaves both of them stunned. In the aftermath of the accident, Kenji insinuates himself into the squalid beauty of her beach house, washing piles of laundry and crusty dishes, and suffering through the scatological tendencies of the house's mistress, who overcomes their lack of a common language with enough English to ask him — when she's not too stoned to speak — if he masturbates a lot.
As the Death and the Maiden setup makes clear, Ratanaruang traffics in extremes. The slow, lovely idyll of Kenji and Noi's relationship is sandwiched between eruptions of mayhem, and while Ratanaruang has dialed back the cack factor from his previous films (most recently the musical morality play Mon Rak Transistor), he still can't help following up a poignant moment with accusations of farting.
The house has its own duality — it's a rotting Eden that is miraculously resurrected through Kenji's ministrations. Doyle's expressionistic camera work reveals the characters' growing tenderness through the house's transformation, lays out their most intimate dreams more clearly than their broken conversations can. An elegy to two people who help each other struggle out of numbness and grief, the film would be intolerably maudlin were it not for the restraint with which Ratanaruang measures his characters' transformations. By the end, the film grants Kenji a sort of post-coital cigarette, which this fastidious man surprisingly lights up without the benefit of an ashtray. His Post-It note lies in front of him — "This is bliss." This time, the suicide note reads like a bittersweet valentine. — Noy Thrupkaew |
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