Surrealism, yakuza and Chris Doyle converge in the cool, oddly romantic comedy of Last Life in the Universe. MUBARAK ALI writes.


IN ITS COOL DETACHMENT and dark, deadpan humour, Last Life in the Universe (the original Thai title of which translates to 'tiny enormous love story') may at first resemble an Aki Kaurismaki film, but surely there's more desperation here than in the Finnish director's cinema. We are introduced to Kenji (Asano), one of the film's desperate souls, after a curious scene involving an attempted suicide. Kenji is a lonely librarian who, it seems, has read every book there is to read, and lives by himself in a flat in Bangkok. He meets no one, talks to no one (indeed he is Japanese and speaks little Thai), and is fascinated by death. Quite literally by accident he encounters Noi (Sinitta), the film's other desperate soul. She's a beautiful Thai prostitute whose sister Kenji helps carry to the hospital after she's hit by a van. The two are so aloof at first that it takes us a while to realise that we have met our protagonists. And they are polar opposites. He's the languid, introverted neat-freak; she's the bored, disorderly pothead. Hereafter, the film essentially traces the placid trajectory of their somewhat idiosyncratic attraction towards each other.

This is a beautifully shot film. Lensed by one of best cinematographers currently working in the world today – Christopher Doyle (Hero, In The Mood For Love, Chungking Express, etc.) – the film is suffused in muted colours, and married to the minimal ambience that director Pen-ek Ratanaruang (6ixtynin9, Monrak Transistor) goes for, its characters' feelings of repression and existential turmoil take definite form. (There is also the magnificently serene trip-out sequence, which probably qualifies as Doyle's most surreal shot). The film is punctuated by tonal shifts, the first of which occurs early in the film when violence breaks its mood upon the visit of Kenji's elder yakuza brother. Soon after, there is an apposite shift in setting from urban Bangkok as Noi reluctantly takes Kenji to her secluded beach house in a small coastal town. Plot dissolves from this point, as the film becomes a series of moody episodes which observe the developing relationship between the two, as they drift from their respective existential voids into each other.

One of the film's profuse serendipitous touches is that Noi, in an attempt to escape the onerous Bangkok atmosphere, was about to leave for Osaka before the events which led to their meeting occurred, and their convergence becomes oddly didactic – a rehearsal for her probable future contact with the Japanese, if you will. And yet despite her attempts to learn a few more words from him, much of the dialogue between the two is in broken English, a reflection of the communication barrier between them. The film is sensitive in its approach to the cultural experience, something which its American cousin, Lost in Translation, is not – the 'cultural alien' in that film being a foreign landscape, whilst here it's in the form of an immediate foreigner. Another point of incongruity between the two films is the drift from urban to rural in Last Life, which essentially denies its characters from mirroring the impersonal distance of the city. Also, Johansson and Murray, cool as they are in Coppola's film, are perhaps a bit too eloquent in their ostensibly 'lost' states, while silence itself becomes a means of communication in Last Life.

Tadanobu Asano and Sinitta Boonyasak as the leads here are great, albeit not as groovy as the aforementioned Americans. Asano especially seems to possess the uncanny ability to make his actions seem sad and humorous at the same time, like how he's always searching for The Last Lizard – this book he's lost, or how he gradually introduces cleanliness in Noi's house, or how he apologises by lying before the front tyres of her car. Asano's already been in Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi and Takashi Miike's Ichi The Killer, portraying outrageously different characters. And speaking of Miike, trivia-enthusiasts will have a ball – a poster for his Ichi The Killer appears in a library (a library!), and there's a precious appearance by Miike himself as a yakuza hitman.

Which brings us back to the deceptively superfluous acts of violence in the final scenes when the film's themes of regret and remorse emerge. And we discover why Kenji has that tattoo of a dragon on his back. And all the cyclic violence attains Meaning, beyond the motif of contemporary loneliness which we initially associate the film with (not least because of its title). Of course by now, even if its elusive ending impedes your appreciation of its form, you'll still be going home with its strange moody crux in your bones.