Credits where credits are due
Last Life in the Universe fashions a perfectly flawed love story.

By Johnny Ray Huston

THE BEGINNING CAN be the end – or at least a halfway mark – and the movie marketplace may be global, but it's still small enough to become a playful echo chamber. Two years ago, Thailand's Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul placed the opening credits of Blissfully Yours at roughly the midpoint of that sublime underseen film. This spring, playing to the wider audiences Hollywood advertising can buy, Michel Gondry seemed to have stolen a page from the book of Joe, taking his own sweet time to get to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's credit sequence. And now – though it actually predates Gondry's quandary – another film from Thailand with tardy credits has arrived. The title of Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe appears nearly an hour into its run time, as one spell dissipates and another begins to form.

If the gestures are similar, the temperaments of the directors behind them vary. Blissfully Yours' inventive credits placement evolves from the film's meditative editing: as the movie's characters and viewers travel somewhat laboriously from one overheated, cloistered world into another, the names of actors and crew arrive on a so-nice samba breeze like a delightful surprise. For Gondry, a similar motif and scenario is but one of many mind's-eye tricks, another division between lonely arctic chills and romantic hot flashes.

Merely ask Ratanaruang about Last Life in the Universe's editing, and he'll beat you to the Blissfully Yours punch, downplaying any such comparisons before launching into a Godard-nodding explanation that still calls Weerasethakul's film to mind. "We decided we wouldn't treat the title as a title, but as an image, a shot that happens to be black with white letters," he says. "It has to come at the point where we're going to transport the [main] characters to a different place. Physically, they're being transported, but mentally they're also being transported to another dimension, a weird space where they start connecting."

The characters Ratanaruang refers to are a romantic couple of sorts, albeit one drawn together by the death of another character who lingers like a ghostly stowaway. (Even here, the embattled faux-familial trio at the core of Blissfully Yours might be worth referencing, though the humidity of Last Life's atmosphere is considerably cooler in more than one sense.) Kenji is a shy librarian who happens to be as efficient with a gun as he is at stacking books. Noi is a chain smoker and weed fiend who treats all kitchenware like it's disposable. One is a reclusive representative of Japanese fastidiousness, the other an enigmatic envoy of Thai funk.

And this Japanese-Thai coproduction is a control freak's highly stylized grasp toward freedom and spontaneity, an effort that finds beauty in near-perfectly realized moments of failure. Ratanaruang claims that his fourth feature – and follow-up to 2000's traditionally garish and folksy Monrak Transistor – was an opportunity to cut loose from storyboard-narrative rigidity, to "go all-out" and run the risk of making "a really shitty film." Yet his taste in individual elements couldn't be more methodically fashionable. He's cast Asano Tadanobu – a true movie star, a young Eastwood for the early 21st century – as Kenji. Asano's Ichi the Killer director, Miike Takashi, cameos as a yakuza boss with a weakness for pink snakeskin. The monograph-ready cinematography is by art cinema's commercial crossover hero of the moment, Christopher Doyle.

Taken together, it could be a bit much, and occasionally it is. But Ratanaruang is confident enough to place Asano's trademark mute storminess (he jokes that he'd like to write a screenplay for the actor in which Asano's character talks nonstop) in service of his own witty sensibility. As opposed to Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Distant – in which, in Ratanaruang's words, Asano was filmed "like an ashtray, or a tree" – Last Life heightens the actor's trademark tender ferocity. Asano might not exhale smoke out of holes in his cheeks here, but his Last Life role still makes a fine flip side to his supermasochist in Ichi the Killer.

Ditto Doyle's liquor-ish shotmaking extravagance and Miike's glam dandy brutality: Ratanaruang masterfully isolates and positions these elements, then adds grace notes – in particular, a minimalist soundtrack that mines emotion from the quiet rush of waves, the tinny fanfare and chatter of a language instruction tape left on Repeat, and similarly repetitive slow-motion keyboard melodies that descend into silence. "I told them, 'Please, whatever you do, just make sure that people don't hear it,' " Ratanaruang explains when asked about the latter, composed by Thai group Small Room. "I don't want people to notice the music coming and going. I want them to feel it."

He's succeeded, perhaps because (in contrast to My Bloody Valentine's rescue mission in Lost in Translation) Small Room have something more than apathetic displacement to hang their notes and chords upon. Like Sofia Coppola, Ratanaruang toys with stereotypes in crafting a mood piece, but English is a mutually strained obligatory common ground here, not a privileged position. His film's lampooning is comparatively specific and grounded in experience. Take Kenji's coworker at Bangkok's Japan Foundation, a woman who sports a lacquered bouffant. "We based her on a real person who works there," Ratanaruang says. "I don't know why, but in Thailand, the places where you go to get visas – the consulates – have these Thai women who seem frozen in time. My mother worked for an American embassy for 35 years, and I'd see all these women with helmet hair walking around."

Dig into Last Life's ingredients and other traces of autobiography emerge. Ratanaruang is quick to outline the differences between himself and the suicidal Kenji – for example, though Kenji has more than a mild Mishima obsession, Ratanaruang "doesn't particularly enjoy" the morbidity of Mishima's writing. Nonetheless, certain passing remarks ("Reading has been very good to me") suggest this film director remains a bit of a librarian at heart.

Sporting a pair of designer spectacles, Ratanaruang has the cultured air, if not the exact accent, of a James Mason, and though he pledges allegiance to Renoir and Fellini, Last Life proves he isn't immune to an occasional Hollywood reference. "Noi's house in the film is bigger than what I originally imagined, and the pool was not in the script," he explains. "But when we saw it, we thought, 'This is straight out of Norma Desmond.' I rewrote the script so that Noi would only live in one corner of the house, and you'd be able to see dusty footprints from that corner to the toilet."

Interviewing is a dirty business, and the path to funk leads in one direction – Ratanaruang briefly departs for some bathroom thinking when asked how his years spent studying art history in college [at New York City's Pratt Institute] and his years making commercials after graduation have influenced his moviemaking. On returning, he weighs the contrasts. "Shooting commercials is great [training] because you have to be disciplined – you learn a system," he says. "Art history made me have to read a lot, so reading became the way I live." But H.W. Janson isn't the one who set Last Life's director on his current path: "I read an interview with Woody Allen that got me started. He said he didn't want to make masterpieces, he just wanted to keep making films. I thought, 'Maybe moviemaking's not that serious.' "

'Last Life in the Universe' opens Fri/17, Opera Plaza, Van Ness at Golden Gate, S.F. (415) 267-4893; and Act 1 & 2, 2128 Center, Berk. (510) 464-5980. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.