Last Life in the Universe: Love and Longing in Dimension Blue
Miles from home, miles to go. Miles spent dozing in uncomfortable recline, in queues, eating out of sterile plastic containers, shuffling among strange faces in strange places, eyes open just till the laptop battery holds through. Continuous transit through a hyperreality where the sun never shines enough to out-bright the plastic white daze of the corridors of passage. Being awake or dreaming is a state of mind. Like jet lag. A strange world where rush hour follows rush hour and then yet another. Hurtled through the gray blur it is possible that one may lose oneself. Dissolve. Blend. Yet another plaster face starring at the signs. Follow the arrow. Up. Down. Left. Right. Newton’s Law number one. Miles to go and no time on hand. Walk forward-onward towards the light till the buzzing synthetic halo sucks you in.
And somewhere in between these signs of kinesis there are others. More complex than the simple arrow and looser in their interpretations. Male. Female. Smoking. Drinking Water. Rest Area. Food Court. Bar. Book Shop. Phone Booth. Shed that face-cast. If you can’t smile atleast frown. Assimilate yourself. One who travels at such speeds tends to leave shadows and impressions in parallel dimensions and different time-zones. Re-set your watch. Come together right now.
Man meets woman and finds out over coffee, Flaubert, Dylan, Bach and Guru Dutt that they have much in common and that they will never be young again. In a bookstore, someone finds a brand new edition of ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’. Once he had been convinced that reading it would change his life forever. Another finds himself obsessed with the girl across the bar because her ears remind him of someone once dear to him. A woman stares into a mirror, finds the first strand of white hair and realizes that the revolution will never happen and perhaps she would like a divorce. Life has accelerated and passing through it with conditioned detachment, one perhaps loses sight of abstracts like destiny and fate replaced instead with arrows. And as some signs ask you to rest, relics of the past or bastardized versions of them- a muzak, a remix, a book cover gone pop, may just creep up on you and connect the dots to a past and to a very different you. There is emotion that begins at nostalgia and then seeps in deeper, there is the vacuum of what you have lost and somewhere in there is a tryst with fate and destiny that you may or may not choose to ignore. We had been born into a different world, more expansive, more caring, more hopeful. We had better things planned. We were brought up when television was NFDC, Hollywood was Scorsese, Coppola, McQueen and the westerns, comics were Indrajaal, the Nehruvian was still valid and before the mosque came down and RDX became common parlance. Surely there was something lost. Nothing was betrayed but something was lost.
This lost generation, not yet old but not young, has had its share of chroniclers. Sarnath Banerjee, Haruki Murakami, Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar Wai, Tsai Ming Liang among others. If Richard Linklater’s slackers were ever to leave their university towns and try to make a living in the world outside they would fall under purview of the above chroniclers. Japanese author Murakami is probably the master at etching the vague melancholy of this loss starting with his 1987 breakthrough Norwegian Wood in which a man’s memory of an eventful past of love and longing unspools on hearing a muzak version of the Beatles hit in an airline. That the tale should make logical sense or have sense of real time and place is no impediment, these are convoluted tales of a loss that cannot be measured in tangibles. Not unlike Wong Kar Wai’s melancholy works. And somewhere in between Kar Wai’s jukebox chic and the absolute spare absurdity of Liang lies the magnificent frailty of Pen-Ek Ratanurang’s dreamily titled ‘Last Life in the Universe’.
Ratanurang’s 2003 masterpiece goes from the opening credits to intriguing in less than five minutes. From the first shot of a lizard against a wall, Kar Wai regular Christopher Doyle shoots with a palate of various shades of white and blue and a muted ethereal moonshine. Along with Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano’s deadbeat cool performance and presence, ‘Last Life in the Universe’ has about the hippest, most striking frames in recent memory. Completing the picturesque melancholy is the background score replete with chirping birds and waves in place of tunes, like you hold a conch to your ears.
It begins with protagonist Kenji dead and his feet hanging over a pile of books that he has kicked out from beneath the noose. Soon it transpires that Kenji is just speculating about committing suicide and in his hand he’s fiddling with a terse last note reading ‘This is bliss’. It is not just a stray opinion. The neatly catalogued learned books that line his house have assured him of this. But just as he is about to commence his attempt, the doorbell rings and it is his brother who has dropped in on an unannounced visit. Looking at the noose, he casually quips to Kenji about it. Seems contemplating suicide is almost a sort of regularly passion to Kenji. Only surpassed by an almost clinically stubborn routine of cleanliness and order and of course, books. A fatalistic sequence with philosophical undertones tempered with light absurd comedy. One has to pause and collect thoughts.
As always with opening sequences where a character dies only to find him speculating in the next cut brings to mind Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurence At Owl Creek Bridge template which Wikipedia will tell you also happens to be one the most popular hypothesis of the film. Yet another even more intriguing possibility is that of parallel dimensions. Add to that the possibility that Kenji has attempted more than a few suicides. How many dimensions and how many stories does that total?
The movie proceeds as it follows Kenji to his work. He is a librarian at a Japanese Library in Thailand. He is as lost as he is disconnected. He cannot speak Thai but he rejects even a Thai native’s efforts to communicate with him in Japanese. Also he is oddly aloof as a Japanese co-worker invites him to her house for sushi. He is a mere slip of existence constantly obsessed with ending it but inevitably finds himself alive.
Meanwhile as Kenji’s brother removes his shirt we understand from the ornate tattoo that graces his back that he is yakuza. Not only that, we’re further told he is in deep trouble for screwing his boss’s daughter. Discussing his escape in a hostess bar the camera begins to track one of the nymph-like girls dressed in school uniform. She has just screwed her sister’s good-for-nothing boyfriend and the girls are having a row over it on the drive home. In a fit of anger the sister stops the car in the middle of the bridge and the other gets off, only for her eyes to meet Kenji’s who is trying to launch himself from the bridge into the water. There are sparks. Love, longing, connection all at first sight. And somewhere from behind comes a car crashing into her.
‘Last Life in the Universe’ is a movie of many twists and surprises. But Ratanurang is not withholding any cards away from our eyes. Rather when he employs a twist it is always tangential and along the tangent a bigger picture is visible- a world outside of Kenji’s sterile present where past and emotion lurk.
Kenji’s brother is killed in a shootout and as bodies accumulate in his house, he impetuously decides after a brief dinner to move in with the surviving sister, Noi. A quirky relationship develops between the two and the movie becomes tri-lingual. Kenji speaks Japanese with scraps of Thai while Noi speaks Thai and is still learning Japanese and to converse with each other they get by with a passable amount of broken English. Moments where the two bond are observant, warm and poetic studies of contemporary loneliness- an acute feeling of being caved in and alone as the world closes in. Kenji was already adrift, displaced in time and space and Noi with her sister’s death and her ex-boyfriend’s constant threat has decided to leave Thailand for ironically, Japan. The time the two of them have together is but transit lounge time and even if they have connected with and healed each other, they will have to move on in disparate ways.
Ratanurang brilliantly plays his two incongruent leads as complementary to each other not just in character but theme and technique. He evokes Kenji’s trouble with the past but not Noi’s. But when we see Noi’s old ramshackle house in the country, it is impossible not to wonder how it is that two sisters who worked as hostesses came to live there. In an effervescent moment of magic realism we see Noi’s healing process but Kenji’s is hardly stated but evident. It is at moments when they are together when all dimensions fuse, time is immaterial and where for the whole and diverse universe outside these two have made the most intimate connection.
But Ratanurang serves his biggest rabbit-out-the-hat for the third act after the couple part ways. Enter schlokmeister Takashi Miike as Yakuza No.1 with two bumbling cronies spouting flamboyance, bloodlust and the coolest dialogue since Sam Fuller as a director in cameo and introduce a reference to Ratanurang’s Tarantino-esque debut 6ixtynin9 and place a perversely cool as hell tribute to ‘Pulp Fiction’. Nothing like Miike to cap things off for a quirky meditative film on destiny, loneliness, a new world and the nature of intimate connections. It works not just in blowing the coolness quotient to a pinnacle high but as evidence of Ratanurang’s inventive virtuosity in directing the film.
‘Last Life in the Universe’ takes its name from a Japanese children’s book called ‘Last Lizard on Earth’ that Kenji reads. As for the beguiling structure of the movie, Ratanurang offers one clue. A painting on Kenji’s wall:-
It is a strange puzzle of a movie that affirms love without a single kiss, affirms longing without the least bit of schmaltz and affirms life with due deference to death. Even if for a negligible moment in this wide ever-changing world, it is worth if not the joy then the melancholy. There is hope in that.
(M.C.Escher Paintings (Metamorphosis II and Plane-Filling Motif with Reptiles) by The Official MC Escher Website, poster by Picasa, arrows by Bittbox, pictogram by fwb)
Tags: Japanese
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Did you watch Ratnaturang’s ‘Ploy’
I liked it so much. I enjoyed it better that last life….
shudnt it be filed under Thai? just asking…
anyways this was the movie that opened my eyes to Thai cinema beyond Tony Jaa… and then I watched BangRaja which was again very raw and a definite treat to watch…
regarding Ratnaruang’s work, loved last life, and The Transistor also…
I loved ‘Ploy’ but i watched the film in rush of a film festival which co-incided with a cousin’s wedding and i didn’;t get to pick on it with relish like Last Life.. which i had on DVD. ‘Ploy’from what i gathered was like a compacter and a hypercube version of ‘last life’. i wouldn’t really say which one’s better. they’re complimentray. linear progression. and that’s always good.
@papai.. couldn’t get thai in the categories… and it was the first time i applied a label on PFC so i just looked to tick.. and all i got was Japanese.. haven’t sen Bang Raja but have heard.. dig Tony Jaa even with all the lame elephants-are-friends epilogue and that side-kick i can;t stand.. would love to see transistor.. i’ve seen 6ixtynin9 though.. it gave me my email ID.. that’s how much i tripped
alas i never managed to find the dvd of 6ixtynin9… now that you reminded me of that movie again, i am planning to watch it online :(
anyways you should check out BangRajan.. in my opinion you will enjoy watching movies like LOTR and Gladiator more after that… just a suggestion… i call it the difference between GLORY wars and UGLY wars… altho even GLORY wars are inherently ugly…
nyaah just rambling
@papai.. online?? explain… links?
Hey Siddharth, good post. havent seen it but after reading it want to c it now.
Love this movie. Masterf
One of your best writings since I can remember. Take a bow. I will use the opening lines in a film.
Siddharth
Your writing is as good as the film you wrote about. And LAST LIFE is oneof the best films I have ever seen.
cheers
P.S- Have you seen “Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl” by Katsuhito Ishii???
It is the funniest Japanese film I have ever scene. Its funnier than watching the special features of Kurosawa film DVDs where all these old artists laugh about each other.
Sid – lovely piece. Wonderfully evocative and does full justice to the movie.
siddharth // the short sentences, not unlike staccato of bullets, hit hard – yet, together, they paint a vivid picture. montages. superb, just like the subject matter. keep writing… more, and often.
@Tushar- as kunal khemu tells darshan jariwalla in ’super star’.. mera signing amount??
@mainak- thanks man. i actually fiddled with the thought of inserting a peach hip shark skin poster in. haven’t see it though. and it’s on top of my list.
@subrat- national market, boss??
@wb- tht’s something always on my mind
Loved the post, the images, the movie. That these intangibles form a reality for someone other than you is really comforting. “Sarnath Banerjee”, will have to check it out!!
just finished
last life in the universe
nice
o:-)
thanks for the review siddarth.
watched it last night, one of the most interesting i have seen in recent times.
though i wasnt impressed or anything with the miike’s entry in the movie.. and did i miss the coolest dialogue of his?
now time to catch up on the new names in the thread :D