A historical drama about the past, Rithy Panh’s Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot recognizes its politics through a lot of fog. Based partly on true events (and Elizabeth Becker’s writing), but mostly imagining three French journalists trying to interview Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in 1978. Though the outcomes match those of Becker, Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell and American reporter Richard Dudman, the Khmer Rouge feature is more a film about that time than it is propaganda which it both refutes and embodies.
The movie introduces its analogues for Becker, Caldwell and Dudman in a narrow 4:3 frame, as they approach by air looking to expose Cambodia’s opacity. Irene Jacob plays Lisa Delbo; like Becker whose work informed Panh’s 1996 documentary Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy she is their only woman on this tightly controlled trip. Her audio interviews come from a place of deep knowledge about Communist thought and of wondering how Pot twisted it. Grégoire Colin plays Alain Cariou as a Caldwell stand-in in many ways (his story will be obvious to anyone with even cursory knowledge of the Khmer Rouge), but as someone whose goals are out of Panh’s imagination. Cariou knows Cambodia better than his French colleagues do: He was college classmates with their coolly calculating host and interpreter (Bunhok Lim), he still has an ongoing written correspondence with Pot himself. He also treats his armed handlers with what looks like sycophantic reverence, though whether that is sincere or survival or some combination thereof remains another question mark hanging over the film, which considers how nearness to power can protect people and how it can’t.
Cyril Guei rounds out the group as Paul Thomas, a Black photographer whose only similarity to Dudman is an incidental detail about his having covered Vietnam that Panh brings to the fore at a key third-act turn that treats history like a pliable folklore. But until then, Thomas represents an uncompromising journalistic fury if sometimes tactless given the risks about the state’s control over information, and their visit. What they are allowed to photograph and film is what they can report on, but breaking these unwritten rules might also have unintended consequences for their interview subjects, creating a story throbbing with paranoia.
As they’re shuttled along their tour, the trio’s perspectives clash in quiet ways but the movie argues for journalistic solidarity through incremental terror. It feels perilous in its understanding of disinformation, this work does; its portraits of emotional disconnect and compartmentalization are breathtakingly candid. The reality chunks mouthed by Pot’s officials occasionally get punctured by cracks in the facade that the French trio can glimpse into every now and again.
Panh’s aesthetic strategy is one of the ways in which this tense relationship between truth and falsehood finds expression. He uses old film footage and photographs, often faded, which are shown or superimposed at certain moments during invented scenes or episodes of fictionalization. These tend to occur when Delbo or Thomas takes out their cameras in secret, allowing us a glimpse into the actual history of the Khmer Rouge, reversing the texture of the movie’s fictitious reality. But there are only so many places that a camera can go, and so Panh supplements his frame and their documentations with a visual conceit that seems innocently fanciful at first but soon reveals itself to be sinister.
When they learn about the government’s plans for a historical makeover (which involves replacing certain religious sites with statues of Pot), the journalists are presented with these proposals in the form of carved miniatures: little toys that stand in for things because things themselves are absent. Before long, Panh starts using these miniatures to depict even their most monitored visits; it is an embellishment that grows more unnerving as it comes to represent a loss of innocence. In doing so he weaponizes obfuscating, representational facade all while remaining true-to-horror about what he suggests such facades conceal.
But still the air hangs heavy with warmth and moisture, visually suggesting discomfort for both characters and viewers alike. Aymerick Pilarski’s cinematography often evokes Vittorio Storaro on Francis Ford Coppola’s partially Cambodia-set “Apocalypse Now”; not just Storaro’s intoxicating use of light and shadow, but also those slow-burning, hair raising conversations from Coppola’s war classic ’s , which hold onto cognitive dissonance required perpetrate great acts horror unflinchingly long after you think they should have gone away.
And equally appealingly eerie are Panh’s long close ups, which the music and sound design fill out with empty landscapes. It is as if something has gone deeply wrong with the stuff of the world. The final product is a powerfully timeless representation of power and its mechanisms, boiled down to a story about journalism at the most personal level.
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