Review of 'Meeting with Pol Pot': a guided tour of totalitarianism

The French Cambodian director, Rathy Panh, often cited the genocidal regime of Jemer Rouge, who killed his family and from which he escaped, as the reason why he is a filmmaker. His films are not always directly on that miserable time. But when they are, as is his most memorable achievement, the 2013 documentary nominated for the Oscar “The Missing Picture”, which reimagined personal memories with Diolamas de Figurina clay, one detects a large piece of mosaic assembled by linking devastation, posterior and the memory, never more detailed, only more detailed.

His last is the cold and tense historical drama “Meeting With Pol Pot”, which premiered last year in Cannes. He is not autobiographical, except his fictitious of a real story that occurred concurrent to his childhood trauma: the Khmer Rouge inviting a trio of Western journalists to witness his proclaimed agricultural utopia and interviews the mysterious leader referred to by his people “Brother No.” “However, even this political garbage, which took place in 1978, could not hide a cruel and violent truth of its guests, whose deployment PANH is so expert in representing from the point of view of an increasingly horrified visitor like that of a long -rise victim.

The film stars Irène Jacob, whose intrepid French reporter Lise, a perfect role for her captivating intelligence, is modeled after the American journalist Elizabeth Becker who was on that trip, and whose later book about Cambodia and her experience, “when the war ended,” inspired the script accredited to Panh and Pierre Erwan Guilla. Lisee joins a motivated Mooist professor ideologically called Alain (Grégoire Colin), quickly to enthusiastically name some of his hosts as former school classmates in France when they were aspiring revolutionaries. (Alain's character is based on British academic Malcolm Caldwell, a guest with Becker). There is also the eagle eye photojournalist Paul (Cyril Gueï), which shares the healthy skepticism of LISE and the desire to learn what is really happening, especially with respect to the rumors of missing intellectuals.

With the sound, the rhythm and the images, PANH easily establishes a state of hospitality loaded and contingent, a sheet that seems ready to crack: from the disturbing vision of opening of this small French delegation that wait only in an empty sun asphalt to the strange authoritarian formality in everything that is said and shown through their Sung guide (Bunhok Lim). Life is being written for its microphones and cameras and flanked by armed teenagers with blank face. The square cinematography of the film, also reminiscent of a staging news, is another subtle touch: one imagines that Panh rejected the wide screen as just feeding the vision of this evil regime of its own fair grandeur.

Only Alain seems anxious to ignore misinformation and hug this village of Potemkin as the real business (except when their eyes show a meeting concern). But the more Lise questions the claim of a happily remitted society, the more nervous everything gets. And when Paul manages to avoid his supervisors and explore the surrounding area, stimulating a frantic search, whose threatening tenor elevates Lise's hackles, the film effectively becomes a drama of the prison, with the eventual interviewee of the trio represented as a shady guardian who can decide his destiny.

Journalism has never been more threatened than at this time and “gathering with Pol Pot” is a powerful reminder of the value of the profession, and the inherent dangers, when it confronts and exposes facades. But this disturbingly elegiac film also reflects the moving sensitivity of its director with respect to the massive tragedy that drives its aesthetic temperament, never more than when its beloved artisanal clay figures depends again for the key moments of atrocity or threads in the file file, as if it maintains the necessary intimacy between rendering and reality.

Power protects its misdeeds with propaganda, but Panh sees such lies clearly killed, giving them an honest staging, full of echoes.