Kenji is a very orderly Japanese man living in Bangkok. His shoes are neatly stacked in racks labeled “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” etc. His closet is full of shirts and slacks in quiet, unchallenging colors. His numerous books are neatly organized in piles and on shelves with labels. He works in a library where books also have their designated spots. He wishes he were dead. As he says, not because of money problems or a broken heart, but because of intrusions – phone calls, e-mails, other people. He would like to get on with his life – the next one. This one no longer satisfies. We learn of his psychological state from calm voice-overs as he prepares his death by hanging, but, predictably for one who hates intrusions, the doorbell buzzes and he must postpone his departure.
What then ensues is a quietly fascinating meditation on fate. Kenji’s orderly life is no longer his own, not even to end, as his gangster brother arrives reeking of chaos, as an “accidental “glimpse of a young woman at the library quickens his pulse, as an old man intrudes on his quiet reading, and as he prepares to jump off a bridge. Kenji’s consideration of death has both grave and uplifting consequences – the unexpected death of an innocent girl and a momentary entanglement with Noi, a woman who is his complete opposite in personality and lifestyle.
Focused on such an uncommunicative, introverted character as Kenji, the “story” in LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE is of necessity revealed through images, facial expressions, body language, compositions, camera movement, and snatches of dialogue, much of it in simple English-as-a-second-language. Christopher Doyle’s camerawork, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s direction, and the understated acting of Tadanobu Asano and Sinitta Boonyasak all form a perfect minimalist film, so very different from last week’s VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN, which was so highly sensual and visually tactile. Here, in LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE, we are often kept at arms’ length from the characters, who only reveal themselves through glances and simple actions.
Like Kenji, director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang might seem a bit of a mystery himself, although he appears very open in interviews. English comes easily for him since he spent his final high school years in the United States, after being dismissed from a private boarding school in Bangkok for burning down a disagreeable teacher’s home. All he really wanted to set on fire was a mattress inside the house, but one flame led to another. Raised by his grandmother while his parents lived in London, Pen-Ek must have been a bit of a handful.
After his high school experience in a small town in Pennsylvania, a town in which Pen-Ek was not only the sole Asian, but also the only “foreigner,” he understandably moved to New York to go to college where he studied art history. Still not really wanting to return to Thailand, he stayed on in New York as an illustrator in a design firm. It was an exciting time to be in New York with the early 80s explosion of punk, new wave, and performance art. He was energized by the works of David Byrne, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Barbara Krueger, and Laurie Anderson.
But after three years he decided to visit Thailand for a few months. Being back there made him realize how hard his life was in New York. He discovered that he could live more comfortably and cheaply in Thailand and the “quality of life was really great.” He was determined to move back home even without a job. But after closing up his life in New York, he visited Berlin, where he stayed with his sister for six months. It was yet another place he fell in love with. He went to coffee shops, watched people, played chess, and wrote. He loved the architecture in Berlin and the Bauhaus Museum [certainly a clue to his understanding of Kenji in LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE].
Instead of working in a Cambodian refugee camp on his return to Thailand, as originally planned, he was persuaded by a friend to come work in advertising. For four years he served as an art director for print media. Then he was lured over to a production house that shot commercials. Through 30-second commercials, he became a director and did so well that he won lots of prizes. For five years he made commercials and then decided to write a script for a feature film. Some producers read the script, listened to his ideas, and said, “Yes, we’ll pay for this.” The result was FUN BAR KARAOKE (1997). Even though the film didn’t do well in Thailand nor win any awards, it was still considered successful enough for the producers to pay for his next film, 6IXTYNIN9, which won awards in Berlin (appropriately) and Hong Kong.
Even though filmmaking had never been a childhood dream, not even while in college or during his early jobs, he had definitely grown to love films once he was living in New York. In fact, it was a poster for a rerun of Fellini’s 8 ½ (with its highly stylized “8”) that drew Pen-Ek into the theater to see a film he knew nothing about by a director he had never heard of. He remembers, “… at the end of the film I was completely blown away. I didn’t understand shit, I didn’t understand at all “what is this?” you know, but… it was so sexy to me. It was so attractive. That was the first film in my life that actually sort of gave me the idea that—this guy can make films? This is film?” A search for other Fellini films led inexorably onward to Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Fassbinder, and the other gods of cinema of the 60s and 70s. “And, so I discovered this art cinema that I found really to my taste. Like I really like this! I really like all [this] stuff. And half of them I don’t understand. It’s a big mystery that you don’t even understand it but you find it so seductive, so beautiful. So in a way I sort of caught the cinema virus there. But of course I never had the idea that I want to do this, I couldn’t. It’s beyond your capabilities.” In fact, he naively believed that films could be made only by “geniuses” [his word].
Yet, by the time he was directing commercials, he began to see that he was doing on a minor scale what feature directors did on a grander scale: “You’re handling cameras and you’re using dolly tracks, and you’re shooting people, you have to direct people. You have to say, “do this, do this, no, do it slower, no, do this”. At night he would watch pirated videos of films. But this rash – this need to make his own feature film – just wouldn’t go away. Work on commercials would make him ignore the “itch,” but the awareness always came back. “Until one day…it doesn’t go away. So it’s slowly kind of becoming a disease. That in the beginning was just a rash. You go like that and it’s gone. You put some cream on it and it’s gone. But after a while, the germ got stronger. It wouldn’t go away.”
He started this new adventure by writing a story but not for a short film. He simply dived right into a feature film script. Apparently making the commercials was enough training. By Western standards he was “starting late,” but as he points out in interviews, the Asian production model is quite different. An aspiring director in the past often had to work as apprentice and assistant to a more established director. But Pen-Ek didn’t even bother with the apprenticeship. Still, he says that he didn’t feel he was entering the film world too late in life. He explains, “Because in Asian film, intelligence and cleverness doesn’t count. You have to be a bit more mature. It’s about emotions, and it’s about what life is about. That’s what our kind of films are about.” And that requires some living and experiences.
The first film, FUN BAR KARAOKE (1997), was made to see if he could do it or even if he enjoyed the process. He swears that even if his first film had been successful at the box office, if he had not enjoyed making it, he would have walked away. Fortunately he did enjoy the process of filmmaking and even though the film didn’t make much money, he was determined to continue, now with new confidence in his abilities.
His approach to filmmaking is most refreshing: “The way I make films is purely out of curiosities. That’s the only thing that drives me. I don’t plan my career. I don’t have a career. Each project that I work on is just a combination of what I want to say at the time, what question I have in life, what I’m obsessed with at the time, plus, things that are forced upon me. And then I combine them, and see what I come up with. And that’s the way I make films.”
For LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE Pen-Ek was obviously concerned with thoughts of death. In one interview he revealed: “Right after I made my second film (6IXTYNIN9, 1999), I had to travel to a lot of festivals. At the same time I was making a lot of TV commercials and this made me very tired. We have so many choices today, with emails and cable TV, that it seems life was so much simpler 20 years ago. At a dinner party a friend of mine said, ‘Maybe we should all die now, it seems so much more relaxing.’ Death is something that I think about constantly. You have to understand that in the Buddhist Way, death is part of life and it is not the end of life. So actually death is like taking a nap.” That would provide the essence of the character of Kenji.
Although Pen-Ek had written the scripts for his first three films and had even written a treatment for LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE, he decided to turn to Prabda Yoon, a writer he really admired, and see what he could do with the treatment. After Pen-Ek told him the story of the suicidal guy and the prostitute and the gangsters, Prabda, with no notes in hand, went away and didn’t contact Pen-Ek for three months. But the director had faith in the writer, whom he knew to be a very disciplined person. After those months had passed, Prabda emailed Pen-Ek the first draft and the director loved it, most of it, except for the ending and a few other parts. What Pen-Ek really loved was that the novice screenwriter had given him a script that was virtually unfilmable in traditional terms of dialogue and action. Pen-Ek saw this as a challenge to film the unfilmable without boring the audience. He made the necessary changes to sections he didn’t like, all with permission of Prabda, “who has no ego at all.”
Naturally the actual filming with characters on location changed the script in other ways, particularly with the powerful input of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who often speaks as if he “made” each film he works on, and the interpretation of Kenji by Asano, the actor who is a rock star in Japan and played the extreme gangster with a carved up mouth in Takashi Miike’s infamous ICHI THE KILLER.
Pen-Ek felt an almost complete freedom to enjoy the process even while sometimes not knowing where the film would go – “I know how to control a film— and with Chris’ experience, with Asano’s experience, there’s no way we were going to fuck it up. I knew that. There’s no way we were going to make a piece of shit. It’s impossible. Even if you try. So I had that comfort. And I didn’t know the people who gave [me] money. So if I made a bad film, I don’t have to see them again. So, I kind of went [to the cast and crew] and said “Let’s not know too much about what we’re going to do. Let’s just look for the film.”
Continuing, he adds, “I’m not a visionary, I hope, and I work towards [having] my own film language, my own voice. That is what I hope for. But since I’m not trained to do this, while I’m making these films, I’m also learning how to make films. So for me curiosity is the biggest thing for me. I would stop making films if I’m not curious.”
-- Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
Sources:
• Alexis A. Tioseco, “A Conversation with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang ,” Criticine (an excellent website dedicated to “elevating discourse on Southeast Asian cinema”)
• http://filmbrain.typepad.com/filmbrain/2004/05/found_in_transl.html
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A2895168
• IMDB.com
• LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (DVD , commentary track by director of photography Christopher Doyle)
