I can completely understand people who wouldn't care for Last Life in the Universe: it's slow, quirky, understated.
To explain it, a brief tangent: To the careful viewer, John Cassavetes's Killing of a Chinese Bookie is about a man who learns to wipe his hand on his jacket. In the beginning of the movie, Cosmo (Ben Gazzara at his best) is celebrating having paid off the bar he runs and finally owning it. He puts on a white suit and goes out for a drink. When the bartender hands him the glass, it's wet. He shakes the water off his hand and looks around for a napkin, obviously reluctant to get anything on his suit.
But by the end of the movie, as he's standing wounded on the curb of the club he's going to lose, waiting for his impending death or arrest, he sees blood on his hand. He casually wipes it onto his jacket without a thought. That's the character arc, carefully described in the way that only Cassavetes could do it.
Last Life of the Universe is similar in how it progresses Kenji, a Japanese expatriate living in Bangkok. It's a movie about how he replaces his glum fantasies of suicide with something else. Like Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the arc is more important than the events or the exposition. The details of who he is, where he came from, or where he's going are peripheral to the change observed by the movie.
Kenji reminded me a lot of Barry Egan in Punch-Drunk Love, another fascinating study in character development. Just like Barry Egan's suit is an important and subtle part of his character development, so is our first glimpse of Kenji's bare back*. He's a mild-manner tidy librarian with an odd side that doesn't make sense until later in the movie. Even then, you have to infer a lot of the details, which are open to interpretation but tell you just enough to explain, for instance, why he's not intimidated by a vicious Thai pimp.
At its basic level, this is a love story about displaced people connected by a strange coincidence. There's a stunning bait-and-switch early on as the movie establishes itself. Like the car wreck at the opening of Punch-Drunk Love, it rattles you with the possibility that anything can happen. And then anything does happen.
The tone is similar to Lost in Translation: languid and disconcerting, adrift in a strange place. But unlike Lost in Translation's portrait of Tokyo as a giant pinball machine that traps people and bounces them around, Last Life progresses from the urban to the rural. The mismatched characters who need each other escape to the country to carve out their own pastoral idyll (Withnail and I comes to mind as another example of this). Here they're free of the metropolitan entanglements that keep people from learning about each other. Here they're forced to listen to each other and experience each other in a way that probably wouldn't have happened in the city.
The actor playing Kenji is Asano Tadanobu, whose name meant nothing to me until I looked him up on IMDB. He's the same guy who played Kakihara, the psychotic renegade yakuza with the unhinged jaw in Ichi the Killer! And here he's a quiet introverted nebbish guy. He also played a noble misguided ronin in Zatoichi. This guy's great! This also explains why there's a funny cameo by Miike, the director of Ichi the Killer, and a weird shot that includes an Ichi movie poster.
I don't know if Last Life got any North American distribution, and I've never heard of the director before. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is from Thailand, but according to IMDB he studied at a New York art school for eight years and then worked as an art director in Thailand for five years. His background shows clearly in Last Life's visual composition.
The movie looks great. This is the first time I've gone to a movie because of the cinematographer. Christopher Doyle is an Australian who's worked extensively in Asia. He shot Rabbit Proof Fence and Quiet American for Phillip Noyce (the former featuring noteworthy cinematography). For this reason, one of the girls going to Sundance had this movie on her list. So when I was sitting bored in another movie, I decided to leave to try to see Last Life in the Universe. I'm glad I did.
Spoiler: Kenji's back is covered with a giant dragon tattoo, implying he used to be a yakuza back in Japan and explaining a lot of the things that happened previously in the movie.
To explain it, a brief tangent: To the careful viewer, John Cassavetes's Killing of a Chinese Bookie is about a man who learns to wipe his hand on his jacket. In the beginning of the movie, Cosmo (Ben Gazzara at his best) is celebrating having paid off the bar he runs and finally owning it. He puts on a white suit and goes out for a drink. When the bartender hands him the glass, it's wet. He shakes the water off his hand and looks around for a napkin, obviously reluctant to get anything on his suit.
But by the end of the movie, as he's standing wounded on the curb of the club he's going to lose, waiting for his impending death or arrest, he sees blood on his hand. He casually wipes it onto his jacket without a thought. That's the character arc, carefully described in the way that only Cassavetes could do it.
Last Life of the Universe is similar in how it progresses Kenji, a Japanese expatriate living in Bangkok. It's a movie about how he replaces his glum fantasies of suicide with something else. Like Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the arc is more important than the events or the exposition. The details of who he is, where he came from, or where he's going are peripheral to the change observed by the movie.
Kenji reminded me a lot of Barry Egan in Punch-Drunk Love, another fascinating study in character development. Just like Barry Egan's suit is an important and subtle part of his character development, so is our first glimpse of Kenji's bare back*. He's a mild-manner tidy librarian with an odd side that doesn't make sense until later in the movie. Even then, you have to infer a lot of the details, which are open to interpretation but tell you just enough to explain, for instance, why he's not intimidated by a vicious Thai pimp.
At its basic level, this is a love story about displaced people connected by a strange coincidence. There's a stunning bait-and-switch early on as the movie establishes itself. Like the car wreck at the opening of Punch-Drunk Love, it rattles you with the possibility that anything can happen. And then anything does happen.
The tone is similar to Lost in Translation: languid and disconcerting, adrift in a strange place. But unlike Lost in Translation's portrait of Tokyo as a giant pinball machine that traps people and bounces them around, Last Life progresses from the urban to the rural. The mismatched characters who need each other escape to the country to carve out their own pastoral idyll (Withnail and I comes to mind as another example of this). Here they're free of the metropolitan entanglements that keep people from learning about each other. Here they're forced to listen to each other and experience each other in a way that probably wouldn't have happened in the city.
The actor playing Kenji is Asano Tadanobu, whose name meant nothing to me until I looked him up on IMDB. He's the same guy who played Kakihara, the psychotic renegade yakuza with the unhinged jaw in Ichi the Killer! And here he's a quiet introverted nebbish guy. He also played a noble misguided ronin in Zatoichi. This guy's great! This also explains why there's a funny cameo by Miike, the director of Ichi the Killer, and a weird shot that includes an Ichi movie poster.
I don't know if Last Life got any North American distribution, and I've never heard of the director before. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is from Thailand, but according to IMDB he studied at a New York art school for eight years and then worked as an art director in Thailand for five years. His background shows clearly in Last Life's visual composition.
The movie looks great. This is the first time I've gone to a movie because of the cinematographer. Christopher Doyle is an Australian who's worked extensively in Asia. He shot Rabbit Proof Fence and Quiet American for Phillip Noyce (the former featuring noteworthy cinematography). For this reason, one of the girls going to Sundance had this movie on her list. So when I was sitting bored in another movie, I decided to leave to try to see Last Life in the Universe. I'm glad I did.
Spoiler: Kenji's back is covered with a giant dragon tattoo, implying he used to be a yakuza back in Japan and explaining a lot of the things that happened previously in the movie.