Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025

[Chris Knipp]

IRÈNE JACOB

RITHY PANH: MEETING WITH POL POT/RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC POL POT (2024)

A surreal jumble of fact and invention portrays the world of a genocidal dictator

Not having learned any more about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge since seeing Rithy Panh's The Missing Pictdure in 2013 (NYFF), I was just as puzzled after watching his recent Meeting with Pol Pot, and found less explanation in reviews. This is more complicated, because it refers not to Panh's personal family history but three journalists' joint 1978 visit to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, based "partiallly" (the blurb says) on actual events, but again with Rithy Panh's use of hand-crafted clay figurines - a device that causes an already very weird moment to seem even more surreal.

On the one hand Panh stages this event with enough realism that it makes you wonder how he did it, where this was shot, who the Cambodian actors are. We know very well who Irène Jacob is, who plays a challenging French journalist called Lise Delbo, and who Grégoire Colin is, that Claire Denis regular who here plays a Pol Pot loyalist and "friend" who knew him in Paris and still correspnds with him, called Alain Cariou. We don't know who Cyril Gueï is who plays a fictitous photojournalist called Paul thomas; he seems mostly to have worked in French TV.

The question of why these three unrelated journalists, all with a marketdly different bent, would be risking their lives together may be answered simply by saying an opportunity for in-person coverage of Pol Pot was too good to pass up. The question arises though of why anybody in their right mind would enter into the world of a brutal dictator in the role such people hate most, someone aiming to report the truth about them. The answer is that war correspondents are risk-takers. In particular the friendly Cariou turns out to be just as much in danger of being offed as the other two, even though it's Thomas who's most outwardly provoctive, and he's the first to "disappear." It's hard to access the factual basis of this film, and other reviews in Screen Daily and Variety don't seem to try to.

Panh creates a convincing sense of place with long shots including what seems to have a plentiful number (for a low budget fllm) of uniformed Cambodians. He also uses black and white archival footage to suggest the presence a world that is being hidden from the journalists, or occasionally found by the photographer. At one point he's by himself in a storage space with large sacks of rice. He pulls out a pen knife and stabs the sack (but how would be be alone, and how would he have a knife? Panh doesn't handle Thomas, the photographer realistially) and he finds the large sack contains nothing but rice husks and dirt. This is after the journalists have been told the Khmer Rouge are producing a preposterously high yield of rice per acre in their farms. So, everythig is a lie. This is a portrait of the mechanics of propaganda.

An utterly surreal and horrible world emerges. The Vietnamese are blamed for every problem, danger, and wiping out of people. It's eplained that "Brother Number 1" will show up when he feels like it without prior warning.

This film is a surreal jumble of fact and invention that gives one, in some ways, a keen sense of what it might have been like to enter the world of this genocidal dictator of communist Cambodia during the three years from 1976 to 1979 1.5 to 3 million people were exterminated. But while Rithy Panh, the director, lost his own famly at this time, this is speculative, and that's perhaps why he makes it seem so intentionally artifical.

Meeting with Pol Pot/Rendez-Vous avec Pol Pot, 112 mins., debuted at Cannes May 16, 2024, also showing at Busan, Rio, the Viennale, Warsaw, and Hong Kong. It opened in French theaters Jun. 5, 2024. AlloCiné ratings: 3.3 (66%) press, 3.4 (68%) spectators. Screened for this revie as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center (Mar. 6-16, 2025). Showing:
Friday, March 7 at 8:30pm – Q&A with Rithy Panh and Elizabeth Becker
Thursday, March 13 at 8:45pm