Ratanarunag views random chance encounters as a way to rebirth.
Viewers will know that they’re in for something that’s off the beaten track when a film’s screen title is only introduced 25 minutes into the film and you’ve got Christopher Doyle lensing the film. Youth culture in Asian cinema takes another poetic turn thanks to Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s much talked about Last Life in the Universe, a perplexing study of how relationships come together – and how they flourish during a time where everyone is concerned about getting from point A to point B.
The simple act of existing seems to be quite the challenge for Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) – a methodical, introverted, bookworm who is consumed by thoughts of suicide, but the almost surreal randomness of life not only interrupts his numerous attempts on his own life. Thanks to a beautiful, chain-smoking young woman named Noi and her pigsty of a home, his schedule for is own termination is slightly sidetracked. The film explores this odd union – despite their coming from very different worlds and speaking from different tongues, their shared experience of remorse and perhaps guilt makes the sense of loss less insurmountable.
Opening with a curiously, blissfully-constructed narrated self-hanging sequence, this is the sort of dreamy tale that merges a Thai love story inside an open-ended temporal strategy. Co-written by the Thai novelist Prabda Yoon, Ratanaruang’s tale infuses odd narrative elements, but hangs on the openness of what people do when they are doing nothing.
With an esoteric consciousness, the film poses as a pathway to unconscious youth, where disorder is resolved by order. Doyle – the devoted cinematographer behind Kar Wong Kai’s cinema, offers a clinical visual look with interesting camera movement found in his steadicam aesthetics, but Last Life in the Universe remains a film that seems too aware of itself, minor violent mishaps offer very little to a story that seems constructed almost by mishap and without depth.
