Meeting With Pol Pot Explores How Ideology Can Curdle Into Evil

The Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who as a boy lost his whole family to the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s, has understandably made the country’s grim history one of the central subjects of his filmmaking career. (His 2013 documentary about this era, The Missing Picture, built out of archival footage and clay figurines, was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.) In Meeting With Pol Pot, he presents a fictionalized version of a 1978 visit by three foreign journalists to Cambodia, which was closed off to the world after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 and relocated the population to brutal agrarian work camps. Rithy’s aim goes beyond a history lesson, however. This film is about something more alive, more present tense.

Among the three visitors is Alain Cariou (Grégoire Colin), a socialist academic who knew Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot when they were student activists in Paris. Cariou is excited to learn more about the utopia of the newly christened “Democratic Kampuchea,” and to push back against what he sees as biased, anti-communist propaganda in the Western press, which has published reports filtering out from refugees about prison camps, torture, mass executions, starvation, and disease. (The Cambodian genocide would ultimately claim around 2 million lives.) He nods along vigorously to his interlocutors’ encomiums about their attempts to create “a new man,” and eagerly swallows the PR-friendly version of life under Pol Pot’s Year Zero brand of communism: a uniform world of anonymous, seemingly happy laborers who’ve given up evil colonialist trappings such as property, free will, individualism, education, and … eyeglasses.

Despite plenty of evidence that the Khmer Rouge experiment is a murderous catastrophe, we can sense Cariou’s touching desire to see his ideals succeed in a real-world setting, as well as the nostalgia that underpins this longing, a solidarity born from the vibrant, idealistic protests of the 1950s and 60s. The Khmer Rouge talk a good game about human dignity, but we see very little of it on display, even in this sanitized setting. We feel Cariou’s increasing anxiety about what he is witnessing, and what he’s not witnessing; Colin, such an unforgettable physical presence earlier in his career in Claire Denis’s Nenette et Boni (1996) and Beau Travail (1999), has a way of using his body to convey the subtlest emotional shifts. Devotion, delusion, and disenchantment, it turns out, are all parts of the same continuum. Rithy has made several films about the Cambodian victims of the Khmer Rouge era, but here the focus seems to be on the crucible of disillusionment through which everyone must pass when the world ceases to cohere with our vision of it.

The other members of this all-French crew are not so starry-eyed. Journalist Lise Delbo (Irène Jacob) reported from Cambodia during the Vietnam War; while she keeps an open mind, she also wants to know what happened to her interpreter from those early days, who was sent to work in the countryside along with everyone else and has not been heard from since. The third member is Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï) a French African photojournalist with years of experience covering war zones: He’s the one who immediately bristles at the Khmer Rouge cadres’ attempts to control the narrative and to prevent him from photographing subjects that they haven’t preapproved.
He’s also the one who discovers that the big, bountiful sacks of rice that have been helpfully stacked for their admiration are actually full of dirt. Much of the trio’s time is spent around the tarmac of the notorious Kompong Chnnang Airport, an airstrip the Khmer Rouge began building in 1976 but never finished; for years afterward this area reeked of death, from the thousands of workers who were enslaved, starved, and executed during its construction, their bones sometimes jutting out of the ground during the rainy seasons.

To depict some of the film’s more harrowing scenes, Rithy opts again for the clay figures he used in The Missing Picture, along with a smattering of archival images. These figures aren’t animated; they’re not a substitute for the real thing, but rather a totemic invocation. Their faces are crudely shaped, their forms rough. They refuse us a direct connection and implore us to contemplate and wonder, to imagine both the horrors they represent and the people they might have been. Something similar could be said for the grainy, indistinct black-and-white photos of tortured and murdered prisoners, the shaky footage of work camps. The Khmer Rouge regime didn’t last long, but it did succeed in cutting off the country; this genocide is known to us largely through the harrowing recollections of its survivors and a smattering of documentary images. (When Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the Nazi death camps at the end of WWII, he instructed that they be documented thoroughly, and for American soldiers to make sure they witnessed what was there; he knew that in the future there would be those who claimed the stories of the Holocaust were fake.)

As suggested by this film’s title, the visitors hope to eventually interview Pol Pot himself. When they do finally meet him, Panh presents the Khmer Rouge leader, known as Brother Number One, as a figure shrouded in shadows, a spectral voice that calmly declares, “Better an absence of men than imperfect men.” (The director himself voices Pol Pot.) How does a youthful belief in a better world curdle into such sociopathic severity? There is a whiff of Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now to the portrayal, as if the madness surrounding him has remade this man into a terrible thought. Or maybe he drove the madness: By the time we meet him, we might feel as if we’ve already seen him, reflected in the grisly evidence of his followers’ acts, in the paranoia and distrust that seeps into nearly every interaction in the picture.

Meeting With Pol Pot is a fictional work inspired by the American journalist Elizabeth Becker’s 1986 book When the War Was Over. The three westerners in the film are based on Becker and two others who visited Cambodia in 1978, though none of the real individuals were French: Richard Dudman was a veteran American journalist and Edward Caldwell was a socialist thinker from Scotland and a vocal supporter of the Khmer Rouge’s project. Rithy has taken his liberties with the book, I suspect partly to lend this tale a certain universality, to reach beyond the particulars of his country’s tragic history and explore the queasy psychological territory where belief systems are confronted and begin to dissolve. Not everyone survives such a confrontation.