Last Life In The Universe
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang 2003 Thailand
A lizard crawling up a wall as if on fast-forward. A collection of shoes, all highly polished and arranged according to days of the week. A body hanging from a noose above a pile of books and a question: Why did I kill myself? So begins Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's comedy-drama, a film black enough to have a suicide attempt interrupted by the seemingly unstoppable ringing of a doorbell and then to have the (unwanted) guest enter the room and calmly say "Oh, suicide again. So, you're going with hanging this time?" The interrupted man is the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano, otherwise known as the sadomasochistic enforcer Kakihara in Takashi Miike's Ichi The Killer (cheekily referenced here). The other man is his brother. Anyone who has seen Ichi may not be surprised. Either way this isn't anywhere near as violent as that film but is at least as bizarre and wholly wonderful for its weirdness, its burgeoning relationship between an extremely OCD Japanese man and a Thai woman whose living room resembles a sort of badly-planned large-scale dish rack not nearly as twee and annoying as that description sounds. Actually it's surprisingly beautiful and quite meditative, just the kind of film the US independent scene used to make before it became obsessed with self-degradation, and I don't think I've ever seen a film where the line "Tomorrow we'll do the laundry" is one of the most seductive. But it works, helped along the way by the magical realism of Wong Kar-wai's regular director of photography Christopher Doyle. It's kind of reminiscent of Wong too, if quieter, less visually audacious and, in its repeated reference to a childrens book, a little more fairytale-like; less Days Of Being Wild as Days Of Being Loveably Odd.
