‘Meeting With Pol Pot’ Review: Reality Unravels in Rithy Panh’s Haunting Historical Fiction
16.05.2024 - 21:23
/ variety.com
Siddhant Adlakha A chilling historical drama rendered with impeccable sleight of hand, Rithy Panh’s “Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot” (“Meeting With Pol Pot“) reveals its political dimensions through layers of obfuscation. While based partially on real events (and on the writings of American war journalist Elizabeth Becker), it crafts a fictitious tale of three French journalists attempting to interview Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in 1978.
Although its outcomes echo the real experiences of Becker, Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell, and American reporter Richard Dudman, the film is as much about a specific moment in time as it is about the mechanics of propaganda, which it refutes and embodies in equal measure. A narrow 4:3 frame introduces the movie’s analogues for Becker, Caldwell, and Dudman, who make their approach by air in the hopes of exposing the opaque Cambodian regime.
Irene Jacob plays Lisa Delbo; like Becker — whose work influenced Panh’s 1996 documentary “Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy” — she’s the only woman on their highly controlled excursion. Her audio interviews are conducted from a place of keen understanding of Communist thought, and of probing curiosity as to Pot’s contortion of it.
Grégoire Colin, meanwhile, plays Alain Cariou, a Caldwell stand-in in several ways — those with a working knowledge of the Khmer Rouge will undoubtedly recognize his story — but a character whose objectives are plucked out of Panh’s imagination. Cariou, unlike his French cohorts, is intimately familiar with Cambodia.
He was college classmates with the group’s calculating host and interpreter (Bunhok Lim), and he even continues a written correspondence with Pot himself. He also treats his armed handlers with a sense of sycophantic
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