Maybe it’s no wonder that there have been so few movies made about the experience of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge — on one hand, it lasted less than four years, in the late 1970s, and on the other, it was a world-class toxic nightmare, arguably the bloodiest, spookiest Marxist turnover in a century fairly littered with them. An unvarnished depiction any harsher than Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields (1984) would require nerves of tungsten, and maybe that’s why Rithy Panh’s patient new film, Meeting with Pol Pot, treads gingerly along the revolution’s margins, tastefully preferring irony, suggestion, and deflection to graphic genocidal carnage.
A creative documentarian who spent his early teen years watching his family die in relocation labor camps before escaping, at 15, to Thailand, Panh certainly reserves the right to be as circumspect and artful as he likes about the Rouge years, which has been his exclusive subject over 35 years of filmmaking. Loosely based on Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Becker’s account of her 1978 visit to the regime, Meeting with Pol Pot is not Panh’s first fictionalization — his career is filthy with fact-fiction hybrids and this one, like his 2013 film, The Missing Picture, even plays out substantial sequences using miniature sets and carved puppet figures. The sitch at hand certainly feels familiarly narrative, and is common enough in totalitarian circles even today: Western journos are invited to report on a new collectivist Utopia but are confronted instead with a carefully managed Potemkin charade, leaving them to check their principles in order to make it out alive.
Propaganda imagery of Brother No. 1 is everywhere.
The trio of visiting colleagues here are French: Irène Jacob, as the reel-to-reel Nagra-hefting Becker avatar; Grégoire Colin, as a Marxist writer who’d gone to school in Paris with Pol Pot decades earlier and who therefore feels he has an in; and Cyril Gueï, as a headstrong photog. (Our own calendars get slammed, remembering the 1990s and Jacob and Colin in their beautiful youths.) From the very beginning, the team’s time in-country has a spectral air — a barren airstrip in the wilderness becomes a recurring liminal no-man’s-land for them; there’s lots of waiting and very little clear communication. Unceasing Maoist propaganda is the only answer their questions receive, as they hope for an impromptu audience with Pol, Brother No. 1. Panh, in fact, structures the whole film as an interlude of stasis and frustration, as the characters struggle for some kind of truth and are met with rehearsals, double-talk, and veiled threats. Meanwhile, Panh knows we know, as the journalists suspect, that the real drama, the real crisis, is happening elsewhere, out of frame, deliberately hidden.
Panh’s budget was low, so the puppet dioramas — including figures representing the French actors — are often inserted when set pieces (villagers farming, excavating, etc.) would otherwise be too pricey to stage. Likewise, we only see the ghostly, depopulated streets of Phnom Penh in news footage shot in the ’70s, which also gives us our only glimpses of murdered and famine-wracked villagers. This media mix, supporting a narrative that deliberately has little propulsion or direction, gives the movie a contemplative, distanced vibe, and you sometimes feel it’s a documentary trying not to be harassed by the dramatic presence of actors. Gueï’s shutterbug provides some tension, once the character decides to disobey his chaperones and vanish into the brush, looking for evidence (which he finds, though again, what he sees is “acted” by figurines). Pol Pot, when the rendezvous is finally scheduled, is another known unknown, shot by Panh from the chest down and in shadow. Meanwhile, propaganda imagery of Brother No. 1 is everywhere, disguising the larger truth Panh doesn’t seem to think we need to see.
Maybe he’s right, this many years later. (He’s 60.) Meeting with Pol Pot is an ellipsis of a movie, purposefully so, doggedly occupying the suspended borderlands maintained on the fringes of dystopic horror, where truth goes to die and where too many of us spin our wheels as the wreckage occurs off-camera. It shouldn’t, therefore, be the only movie anyone should see about the Khmer Rouge, or even the first. Rather, if you’re up to it, a sequential run through the nearly two-dozen-strong Panh oeuvre, from 1991 to today and including 2003’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, would best set the record straight. ❖
Q&As with Elizabeth Becker on Friday, June 13, at the 6:00 p.m. screening, and Saturday, June 14, at the 3:30 p.m. screening
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
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