I’m beginning to realize that, with the exception of Pulp Fiction and sex, lies, and videotape, if a film is lauded at Cannes, I’m going to hate it.

Earlier this year, I spent two hours rolling my eyes and sighing through Sofia Coppola’s angst tone poem about the woe-is-me movie star holed up in an $1,000-a-night suite at the Chateau Marmont (wah, here’s the world’s smallest violin playing just for you), and now I’ve lost another two hours I’ll never get back thanks to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the film which won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, marking the first time an Asian film has received the honor since 1997 and the first a Thai director has ever won.

Let me be clear, it’s not that Uncle Boonmee is a bad movie; it’s just not really a movie at all. It’s more like a fever dream that you float in and out of, without a sense of where you’ve come from or will go next. Directed by Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it begins with Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) returning to his country estate in Isan, where all of Weerasethakul’s films are set, to spend his last days of kidney failure. What happens next is a string of nonlinear, nearly paralytic scenes paced to make turtles caught in tar look like they’re whipping around the track at the Indy 500.

The one standout is the film’s beauty but since it was filmed in Thailand, of course, it’s lush and gorgeous. It’s like taking a Polaroid of a supermodel and then marveling when it turns out well. If you start with something of incredible beauty, it shouldn’t take much to produce a lovely image.

Painfully slow and utterly incomprehensible, this film is strictly for cinephiles who feel suffering is the one true barometer of artistic integrity.

Grade: C-



Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives releases in select theaters March 4.