I don't really know how to score this film, because it's not like anything else I've ever seen. So I'm copping out and giving you the chance to make your own mind up.
I saw it in Toronto in the middle of a lot of other much more commercial and much more straightforward films and this one made me feel like I'd entered unknown territory. My tagline might be - 'Makes David Lynch look like Noddy.' Although that doesn't really help either, since this is not a weird surreal drama so much as a meditation on time, life, death and past lives, conducted at a pace that could either be described as funereal or dreamlike (though my dreams go a good deal faster than this). It requires entering into a different state of mind, although maybe the mind is not the most suitable faculty to use.
At this point, it might be helpful to talk about the plot, except that it's not - helpful, that is. The film opens in a rural community, where a man with kidney failure is preparing for his last days. At dinner one night, his dead wife appears as does a longlost son, who now resembles Chewbacca. That's all before a princess in ancient times has a close encounter with a catfish, of an intimate kind. I could go on, but there isn't any point. You have to see the film (if you want to) with a sense that this relates to philosophical ideas about past lives, and a kind of local magical realism.
If I'm honest, I would have to say that despite its Palme D'Or win at Cannes, I couldn't recommend it, any more than I would want to sit through it again, but it is different and not necessarily in a bad way.
