It's the kind of project that courts doubt and even disdain from the very logline. Angelina Jolie, the Hollywood A-lister lately known for marital drama, is directing a film in Cambodia about the atrocity of the Khmer Rouge years, based on the memoir of a woman who, as a girl, lived through it all.
The horrors of war, forced labour, genocidal terror, child soldiers, starvation, the Killing Fields, blindfolded victims shot in the back of their heads -- all of them a pet subject for the liberal do-goodism of Queen Jolie? Through Nixon and Kissinger, the Americans had left Phnom Penh and it fell to the Khmer Rouge, and now another American has returned, perhaps to right what couldn't be righted in the first place?
Let's give her a break, a small break. Jolie has made a fairly authentic and moving story in First They Killed My Father, an adaptation of Loung Ung's 2000 memoir about her experience in the Khmer Rouge camp (the film is streaming on Netflix). What you see here isn't a revelation. What you see here is also an aestheticisation of one of the worst crimes against humanity. What you see in Jolie's film is frightening, but not nearly as much as what you may have already seen in several Khmer Rouge documentary films of the past 20 years -- those that stare into the abyss and find the abyss staring back, starting with, say, Rithy Panh's S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Rob Lemkin's and Thet Sambath's Enemies Of The People.
And yet Jolie has proven her commitment; If First They Killed My Father is a vanity project, throughout 146 minutes, it doesn't feel like one. To get the film made, she didn't compromise: the dialogue is Cambodian and the film was shot entirely in the country with an all-Khmer cast. It's not easy to get such a proposal greenlit in feel-good Hollywood these days (20 or 30 years ago, maybe) and she made the choice of going to Netflix, which funded the project and now serves it up to 100 million subscribers. This week Cambodia has named the film its representative to the Oscar's Best Foreign Language competition, an official recognition from the country Jolie first visited and with which she felt a deep bond when she went to film Tomb Raider at Angkor Wat in 2000. (One of her adopted sons, Maddox, is from Cambodia).
Cue in drone shots and the choreography of mass exodus, the progression of tragedy is pretty straightforward from the start. After the Khmer Rouge takes over Phnom Penh, the family of Loung Ung (the impressive Sareum Srey Moch) is forced to leave their middle-class home and march to the countryside with her father (Phoeung Kompheak), mother (Sveng Socheata) and two siblings, where they're stripped of personal possessions and identities to become part of the mad agrarian collectivism. Colourful clothes are dyed black and everyone is now toiling in the field under the watchful eyes of gun-slinging Angkar teen soldiers. Those who defy orders, steal food or show doubt risk violence and execution. Corpses float in the ditches and Loung Ung dreams of a mass grave. Soon the inevitable happens: she's separated from her family and trained to become a soldier as the fighting and brutality escalate.
The image of the Khmer Rouge's "agrarian utopia" is best seen in news footage from the era -- used in several documentary films including Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture. In First They Killed My Father, the choreography of fear is honest yet banal -- and at some points verging on exoticisation. The infernally green paddies as a backdrop of black terror don't come across as ironic -- perhaps they're most terrifying when presented in black-and-white, which is not the case here -- and the explosions of landmines fulfil our demand for action.
The cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle (Oscar-winner from Slumdog Millionaire) goes with Jolie's becalmed rhythm -- too calm, too monotonous and too pretty. Loung Ung's father is framed in silhouette against the golden rim light when two guards escort him away for the last time and the repetitive drone shots -- designed to make every life on the ground look small -- often find symmetry and unlikely beauty in the escape, the toil, the approaching disaster. For a chaotic, maddening times, everything seems too orderly.
Maybe because Jolie doesn't want to sensationalise the tragedy, she appears respectful. The story needs a little more guts, blood and pain -- then again, maybe it's safer to take a careful stance instead of risking the charge of exploitation (this is even before the Vanity Fair scandal, in which Jolie's interview seems to suggest that she used a mildly exploitative game to test the children who auditioned for the movie).
In her two previous films as director -- In The Land Of Blood And Honey and Unbroken -- she was overdetermined and those films come across as earnest and lifeless, with no space for the poetics. In First They Killed My Father, she has become fluid, lyrical and sensitive to the emotional cues of the story and the modulation of her actors. Sareum, who plays Loung Ung, is astonishing: she holds the film together from start to finish, and Jolie gives her space. The girl shines in sadness -- her own and her people.
Do we need a feature film, albeit one based on a true life story, about the tragedy committed by the Khmer Rouge? Yes. Why not? We see a new feature film about the Holocaust almost every year. Jolie, performing a balancing act between an emotionally invested storyteller and a detached outsider borrowing someone else's memory, at least has given us one that honours both the survivors and the perished. She fixes the camera steadfastly to Loung Ung's point of view, letting us see what she sees, and yet to understand those years of barbarity and insanity, you also need to look further: at those documentary films by Rithy Pahn (who's also one of this film's producers), at Lida Chan's Red Wedding, which tells about forced marriages by the Khmer Rouge, and even to Cambodian feature films set in contemporary times, such as Diamond Island (released here last year). In her temperament, Jolie has found a story she wants to tell from her heart, but the abyss is vast and only those who stare at it closely can come back out bloodied but alive.
First They Killed My Father
Starring Sareum Srey Moch, Phoeung Kompheak, Sveng Socheata
Directed by Angelina Jolie
In Khmer with English subtitles
Available on Netflix
