Across the Universe Pen-Ek Ratanaruang makes it Last BY A.S. HAMRAH
	Last Life in the Universe Directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. Written by Ratanaruang and Prabda Yoon. With Tadanobu Asano, Sinitta Boonyasak, Laila Boonyasak, Yukata Matsushige, Thiti Rhumorn, and Takashi Miike. A Palm Pictures release. In Thai, Japanese, and English with English subtitles (112 minutes). At the Brattle Theatre August 20 through 26.

Set in and around a semi-deserted Bangkok that’s more an art student’s paradise than a universe populated by dramatis personae, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s fourth feature calls to mind every international auteur film made since the 1980s. Ratanaruang’s feat is that he makes this half-world his own. Be that as it may, Last Life in the Universe begins with a scene out of one movie he probably didn’t have in mind, Jerry Lewis’s Cracking Up (1983). Kenji (Tadanobu Asano, fresh from his work in Takeshi Kitano’s The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) stands in his immaculate, book-filled apartment with his head in a noose. He’s a librarian, we learn, desperate to leave a world where he can’t relax, ready to quit it for good. Then his doorbell rings, one of many such buzzers and bells that call Kenji back to life throughout the film. It’s his yakuza brother, visiting Bangkok to cool his heels because he’s offended his boss in Japan by screwing the man’s daughter.

Meanwhile, somewhere across town, we find the alluring sisters Noi and Nid (Sinitta and Laila Boonyasak), denizens of a nightclub where the hostesses push drinks in schoolgirl uniforms and Playboy-bunny ears. The sisters argue over some thug whom Nid is dating but Noi’s been fooling around with. Their argument continues as they drive home in Noi’s Volkswagen convertible. Crossing a bridge, they pass Kenji, who’s still contemplating suicide after a shoot-out with his brother and a local hit man. Noi kicks Nid out of the car just as Kenji is about to make his fatal leap. She’s struck down in a hit-and-run and killed. In the emergency room, Kenji attaches himself to Noi because he doesn’t want to go back to his apartment, which isn’t as immaculate as it was before the hit man dropped by.

Reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film it predates slightly and is better than, Last Life in the Universe contemplates the beginning of a beautiful relationship that never has time to fail. The film’s one restrained blast of de rigueur CGI bullshit seems to counter the Kaufman-Gondry movie, as Noi and Kenji fall gloriously into place instead of out of it the way Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey do. And unlike Eternal Sunshine, Last Life is uncommunicative, accepting instead of recriminating. It asks few questions and leaves most of them unanswered, which beats giving bad answers to lots of questions. Both films view the world through a marijuana haze, but Last Life in the Universe has the grace not to get all freaked out about it.

Ratanaruang’s film is glued together by melancholy car-driving scenes (he is the current king of driving around). Christopher Doyle’s cinematography is different from what he’s done with Wong Kar-wai — Ratanaruang is a more schematic director, and Doyle knows it. The film begins in a gray-beige-white world, Kenji’s librarian’s world. Then Doyle and Ratanaruang punctuate it with bursts of fantastic red violence before moving it into the total mess that is Noi’s dead parents’ house. The moldy piles of magazines that litter every surface in her house are a clear contrast to the books in Kenji’s apartment, but amid the clutter, the contrast doesn’t come off as simplistic.

Still, simplicity is the film’s way. Everything in Last Life in the Universe is an anticlimax, including what in a cheesier movie would be the big, hot scene. Noi nonchalantly shows up next to Kenji dressed like a Calvin Klein underwear model ("Hey, Jap boy") and nothing much happens. They’re both too isolated and defensive to get together. When it becomes obvious that the lovers must part, Noi asks Kenji whether he ever wants to see her again. "One day," he replies.

"Everything’s sad," the film’s mantra, states, but it didn’t need to be. This is ambient cinema, the filmic equivalent of ambient music. Its plot may be lifted from Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986) or the Molly Ringwald melodrama Fresh Horses (1988), but it lacks the sleazy thrills of such American pictures. When Kenji meets his fate, all Ratanaruang can think to do is spread his possessions out before him in a tableau familiar from too many art-student photography projects. Again, it works. Ratanaruang is not Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki. He’s more like their nephew. Takashi Miike, the director of Gozu, shows up in their stead to marshal Kenji along to the film’s dénouement. Near the end, Noi waits in an airport lounge where the credits from another movie roll on flat-screen TV. Brilliant. Really.