Sometimes life in France under an outrageous government is so strange. Can’t think of what other adjective could describe the bizarre acts of the so-called leaders here: people being deported because of their race, immigrants stripped of French nationality for certain crimes, government ministers in cahoots with the rich and powerful, government controlling more and more of the media, police spying on journalists and officials to uncover sources… What next? Somehow, it won’t last. Nothing ever does.
And yet… We can’t ignore it.
Meanwhile, I heard a critic disparaging the Thai film « Uncle Boonmee (Who Could Recall His Past Lives) » for its supposedly amateurish special effects. And so they are, according to such mercantile criteria. But not in terms of poetics. Sophisticated « effects » in fact convey illusion, not the ineffable truth, which can’t be conveyed by any « special effects, » good or bad. So « Uncle Boonmee » takes us nowhere but here, into the life (of the moment) of a dying man, which is where we all are all the time, anyway.