Having spent the past few years making broad-brushstroke films about the destructive aspects of human nature – first the anti-war found-footage doc Irradiated in 2020, and then a reimagination of Planet of the Apes with clay figurines in Everything Will Be OK (2022) – Rithy Panh reverts to a linear, live-action drama set within a specific place and time.
But Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot) offers much more than what its title suggests. The protagonists’ encounter with the notorious leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime – whom viewers never really get to see, with the tyrant appearing mostly obscured in shadows when he finally appears on screen – merely serves as a pivot around which Panh spins a morality tale about the moral dilemmas and obligations of people made to bear witness to the horrors of the world.
The film is an adaptation of veteran U.S. journalist Elizabeth Becker’s memoirs about her trip to Cambodia as part of Pol Pot’s efforts to court international support in the face of a pending invasion by Vietnam in December 1978. Rithy Panh uses a vivid mix of dramatic re-enactment, miniature models and archive footage to illustrate Cambodia’s hollowed-out cities and Potemkin villages during the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign of terror from 1975 to 1979.
Unfolding with faint whiffs of film noir, Meeting with Pol Pot boasts powerful performances from its cast, with Irène Jacob (Double Life of Veronique) and Cyril Gueï playing journalists whose professional demeanour unravels rapidly as they contend with the consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. Grégoire Colin (Beau Travail) also delivers a gripping turn as a Marxist ideologue whose lifelong beliefs crumble in the face of the perverse ways his Cambodian “comrades” wield their power.
In this adaptation, which is Panh’s eighth feature to premiere at Cannes, the Khmer Rouge’s three real-life anglophone “guests” in 1978 are replaced with fictional French characters. Leading the trio is Lise Dalbo (Jacob), an experienced radio news reporter trying to score a rare interview with the enigmatic Pol Pot after his takeover of the country in 1975. Paul Thomas (Gueï), meanwhile, is a photojournalist much more openly belligerent towards his hosts, his scepticism against the Khmer Rouge fueled further as he unearths ever more proof belying the cadres’ claims of contented lives and record harvests.
Completing the group is Alain Cariou (Colin), a starry-eyed left-wing scholar (à la real-life French philosopher and Khmer Rouge apologist Alain Badiou) who insists Pol Pot, with whom he studied at the Sorbonne in the 1960s, is a friend and a good guy who has “nothing to gain” with his grip on power in Cambodia.
While Dalbo and Thomas are visibly uneasy as they visit the bustling artisanal workshops designed to debunk accusations against Khmer Rouge’s persecutions of artists and intellectuals, Cariou marvels at the myriad Pol Pot busts and murals being produced there. While the two journalists tut and turn away as they are shown Pol Pot’s spartan quarters in a village, Cariou caresses the tyrant’s bed and lies down on it, a blind disciple blessed by the divine grace of his god.
Working with award-winning Taiwanese sound designer Tu Duu-chih, Panh has transformed the incessant metallic clang produced by the artisans into disquieting cacophony – a thinly-veiled reminder, perhaps, of the well-documented violence the Khmer Rouge meted out to the victims in their notorious S21 torture chambers. The bone-chilling soundtrack is echoed by matching imagery, such as the way the three Westerners were filmed through the iron window grilles of their hotel rooms – a knowing nod to similar settings in the brutal detention centers set up by Pol Pot’s regime across Cambodia, also illusfarrating how the protagonists are just as much prisoners as they are VIPs.
As they continue their highly regulated itinerary – trips to bustling collective farms, an interview with French-educated top-cadre Ieng Thirith (Somaline Mao) who insists intellectuals are “living well” – the trio find themselves sucked gradually into increasingly perilous territory. The comparatively civil manners of their French-speaking guide Suong (Bunhok Lim), for example, are constantly undercut by his more rough-hewn comrades. A welcoming dinner which begins with Suong serving his guests Grand Cru wines ends with his fellow fighters’ denunciation of French as the “language of traitors”.
Co-written with Pierre Erwan Guillaume, Panh’s screenplay lays bare the many internal contradictions within a political system propped up by hypocrisy, lies and violence: each and every Cambodian, whether a villager or a cadre, seems to be merely one step from being purged and killed for just the smallest misstep. The three French protagonists are not immune to this threat too, with Thomas subjected to harassment or worse as he embarks on his frequent escapades away from the group to seek the truth behind the façade.
All this is now very well known throughout the world, thanks to Roland Joffé’s Oscar-nominated The Killing Fields, the United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal (at which Becker attended as an expert witness) and of course Panh’s very own documentaries. What Meeting with Pol Pot brings to the mix is how outsiders react when they see the atrocities and their perpetrators up close.
Haunted by her daily observations, her fury about the guerillas’ treatment of Thomas and her fears for the fate of a Cambodian translator she used to work with, the conscientious Dalbo becomes increasingly haunted by horrible hallucinations.
Meanwhile, Cariou unravels as he discovers the vacuity of Pol Pot’s idealistic rhetoric, a breakdown made complete by a dark and despairing conversation with the Brother #1 himself at the parakeet-peddling dictator’s marble-floored, palatial residence in the city. Loaded with Panh’s own views about the myriad contradictions within Khmer Rouge’s raison d’être and support among progressives abroad for such a murderous troupe, the tête-à-tête is brought alive with a beguiling mix of light and shadows, and of medium shots of the dictator in the shadows and close-ups of a teared-up Cariou. It’s a scene that embodies the style and substance driving Meeting with Pol Pot.
Director: Rithy Panh
Screenwriters: Pierre Erwan Guillaume, Rithy Panh based on a book by Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over
Cast: Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, Cyril Guei, Bunhok Lim, Somaline Mao
Producers: Catherine Dussart, Rithy Panh, Justine O, Roger Huang, Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, Hanaa Issa, Mehmet Zahid Sobaci, Muhammed Ziyad Varol, Mirsad Purivatra, Jovan Marjanovi?, Georges-Marc Benamou
Director of photography: Aymerick Pilarski, Mesa Prum
Editor: Rithy Panh, Matthieu Laclau
Music composer: Marc Marder
Set designer: Mang Sareth, Sou Kimsan, Chanry Krauch
Sound designer: Nicolas Volte, Tu Duu-chih, Eric Tisserand, Tu Tse-kang
Production companies: CDP, Anupheap Production, Taiwan Creative Content Agency – TACCA, Doha Film Institute, LHB X AN Attitude, TRT Sinema, Obala Art Centar
World sales: Playtime
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première)
In French and Khmer
112 minutes