Last Life in the Universe, 4 stars

I thought this would be my first Thai film. I was wrong; that spot was taken by "Tears of the Black Tiger" two years ago. They are remarkably similar, however, in their shifts of tone and their global influences. "Tears of the Black Tiger" reached through space and time to be influenced by trashy genre films of all countries and decades; "Last Life in the Universe" takes place in the airport-like limbo of foreign service industry workers in many countries, understanding little and understood still less.

Our hero, if you can call him that, is a shy, depressed librarian who happens to witness a horrible car accident in which a beautiful woman he had seen earlier in the day is gravely injured. His concern leads him to follow the girl's less attractive but more interesting sister to the hospital, where the two initiate a bond that results in him becoming her reluctant roommate. The film borrows from a variety of classic plots: at times it veers into the "odd-couple" genre as the neat librarian and the sloppy-haired pot-smoker try to get along. Eventually it becomes the classic opposites-attract love story, but the film avoids a familiar feeling about any of this. Due to gentle, unexpected pacing and the charm of having the characters communicate in three languages (none very well), the film succeeds at creating and holding a mood and then simply allows its characters to wander through it. Magical realism intrudes at times, as in a house-cleaning sequence with unfortunate and probably unintended overtones of "Requiem for a Dream". The characters have room to breathe and explore in the environment of the film, and the effect is gratitude on the part of the viewer for being allowed to wander alongside these finely drawn, interesting souls for a few minutes.