Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (Rithy Panh, 2024)
A slightly different version of this was originally published at InReview Online as part of their coverage of the 2025 Rendez-vous with French Cinema series.
It’s been over a decade now since I caught Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture at the Vancouver Film Festival. His chronicle of his memories of life in Cambodia in the time of the Khmer Rouge is one of the most emotionally overwhelming non-fiction films I’ve ever seen. I haven’t kept up with his work since then, all of which, as far as I know, mostly also concerns the history and memory of the Cambodian genocide, but he was a surprisingly odd and entertaining follow on Twitter, back when that was a thing. His latest film is a fictionalized adaptation of the University of Washington graduate Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution a memoir of her journey, with two other journalists, to visit Cambodia in 1978 and, as the title says, meet with Pol Pot. In life, as in the film, it ends badly.
Irène Jacob plays Lise Delbo, the Becker stand-in. She’s joined by Grégoire Colin as Alain Cariou (Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell), a Marxist activist who knew many of the Khmer Rouge leadership, including Pol Pot, in Paris before the war, and Cyril Gueï as Paul Thomas (journalist Richard Dudman), a photographer. Jacob and Colin, who were both astoundingly beautiful in the 1990s (in Three Colors: Red and beau travail, respectively) both look as though the past thirty years have weighed heavily on them, but then again don’t we all. The three are escorted around various Potemkin villages (art studios, workshops, farms) and given standard answers about the greatness of Democratic Kampuchea, while growing ever more uneasy at the things they aren’t being told and the apparent cult of personality being built around Pol Pot (“Brother #1” he’s oxymoronically called). Delbo hopes to find her old translator, who, as an intellectual from Phnom Penh, has either been relocated to a collective in the country or (more likely, we know and she suspects) been murdered. Cariou longs to see the success of his friends’ putting their idealistic theories into action, but becomes increasingly disillusioned by the obvious fraud and lurking violence surrounding them more or less explicitly. Thomas boldly escapes from their watchers and travels into the countryside, where he’s horrified by what he finds.
As the tour continues, the film becomes increasingly surreal and disassociated. Rithy uses old stock footage (some of which looks very much like it might have come from something Becker would have shot) and carved miniatures in elaborate dioramas to depict things for which the extras and set-building required would likely be cost-prohibitive. These devices also serve as correspondences for what the characters are thinking, as when Delbo imagines scenes of pre-war Cambodia while rummaging through a ruined house in the city, or when Thomas sees things so horrible he can’t process them as reality, only as images or constructions.
The trajectory thus mirrors that of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now: representatives of the “civilized” world descending into the horrors of “Third World” insanity, a pandemonium largely created by the actions and ideas of Western civilization. The connection of the elite of the Khmer Rouge (if that contradiction in terms doesn’t invalidate their whole project) to European Marxism helps to undermine the implicit imperialism of Conrad’s template, since what is happening in Cambodia (as in Vietnam, as in Belgian Congo) is as much a product of Western thought (imperialist and Marxist) as it is anything native to those regions.
Rendez-vous with Pol Pot also recalls, of course, a pair of classic films about journalism in Southeast Asia: Ann Hui’s Boat People and Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields. Both films, like Rithy’s, center outside journalists as observers of new ostensibly Communist states. Both films differ from Rithy’s in that they offer native protagonists to balance the outsider experience: Hui’s examines post-war Vietnam through the eyes of a Japanese photo-journalist as well as a young Vietnamese man attempting to escape the country; while Joffé splits his narrative between the Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran and his friends in the American and European media. Rithy only gives us the outsider perspective in the narrative, the only Cambodians seen are either sinister troops holding guns or mouthpieces for the state who smile way too much or peasants (or people reduced to peasantry) who are terrified of everyone. Except of course that Rithy himself is an insider, and his personal perspective colors every scene and every shot. It’s a Cambodian’s view of the French journalists who come to Cambodia unsure of, if not outright supportive of, the Khmer Rouge, and slowly see their beliefs crumble before the brutal consequences of those ideals. Because Rithy’s view of the Khmer Rouge is not that they’ve deviated from Marxist orthodoxy, but that they simply followed it to its logical conclusions. That their ideology was too pure. The more brutally apparent these facts become, the more lost in the unknown our heroes become. One disappears, another is murdered, the third is, most inexplicably, sent home to safety.