Meeting with Pol Pot Review: Rithy Panh’s Languid, Incendiary Cautionary Tale

In 1978, journalist Elizabeth Becker was one of three westerners granted permission to enter Cambodia while under the communist rule of the Khmer Rouge. “We were all conscious of our role as singular witnesses of the revolution,” she writes in When the War Was Over. “And, perhaps, of the war everyone was predicting.” Oddly enough, when they arrived in Phnom Penh, apart from armed guards who accompanied them wherever they went, the city was deserted of any signs of life, “a tropical twilight zone.” It was no longer the vibrant city she had once known. They were expected to have a meeting with the party’s dictator––the ambiguous, charismatic Pol Pot––but soon they learned not to believe what they were being told: that the facade, which appeared to have been created just for them, was beginning to crack. 

Inspired by this singular sojourn, Rithy Panh’s Meeting With Pol Pot follows the Black photographer Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï), the nation’s “friend” Alain Cariou (Grégoire Colin), and the journalist Lise Delbo (a divine Irène Jacob) as they study a regime’s performance of its ideals over the course of two weeks. En route to their meeting, the reality of this situation––which included the suppressed mass murder of one-fourth of the nation’s population––eerily reveals itself: between a crocodile’s teeth, on an annihilated photo roll, as ghosts in their night terrors.

With cinematographer Aymerick Pilarski’s lush, Academy-ratio images attuned to chiaroscuro, and composer Marc Marder’s elegant, sparingly used score, Panh uses the frame of Becker’s experience to elegantly enact his own riveting cinematic interruptions. For instance, in a factory where Pot’s portraits are being produced, or a hut in the jungle where the memories of malnourished children are housed, co-editor Matthieu Laclau’s languid rhythm suddenly picks up to become rapid montages that––similar to Panh’s The Missing Picture––weaves archival footage and hand-sculpted clay figurines that, Panh has said, creates the “right distance from the subject… to recreate the real violence.” It is this borderless, mosaic-like approach to adaptation––where the nature of truth and question of the representation of an image capturing reality more effectively is repeatedly developed––that accords Meeting With Pol Pot its metafictional and existential dimensions, producing, by turns, the impending anxiety and balmy languor of existing within a political dream of a bubble on the brink of bursting. 

In a pivotal scene, Lise gazes at a blindfolded Alain attempting to identify a faux-elephant by touch. For each wrong guess—hair for tail; tree for trunk; fan for ears—the guards break out into laughter, which Lise tries to join in on, but, as Jacob’s smile gradually contracts and her talismanic eyes deepen, she realizes the joke is on them, foreigners who, operating for their own institutions, can easily be manipulated if they lose their commitment to witnessing. “We were the original three blind men trying to figure out the elephant,” Becker wrote; here, the trio––each biased and invested in their own way––undergo subtle revelations to, in turn, open our eyes. 

“Those who can be reformed will be,” Pol Pot, voiced by Panh, declares to a trembling, second-guessing, heavily respirating Alain. “The others will be eliminated.” In a time where authoritarianism is rampant, genocides are actively taking place, and journalists daily risk their lives giving voice to the victims of history, Meeting with Pol Pot is a noble, timely, incendiary counter-narrative that devises a way to look forward by making a project of the past, where the act of re-imagining the truth radically remembers the traces left behind by a lost generation.

Meeting with Pol Pot opens on Friday, June 13.

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