After reading Haing Ngor's autobiography, I was ready to watch the 1984 film which made him a star and gave him a way to spread awareness for Cambodia.
The movie is not as dark as Survival in the Killing Fields. Ngor himself said that Dith Pran hadn't suffered the way he had, had escaped the pain of seeing his immediate family taken away from him or killed. Dith Pran's family did leave him, but it was in a helicopter to the safety of America. However, Ngor meant it when he said they were brothers at heart. Ngor was able to translate his suffering into Dith Pran's suffering in the movie, and later in life they shared the common goal of raising awareness of Cambodia.
But what the movie lacks in blackness is made up for in the menace of seeing the Khmer Rouge come to life on screen. Ngor's description of the forced march out from Phnom Penh and the terror of the violent, extreme ignorance of the Khmer Rouge reinforce the scenes in the movie. With the added knowledge from his words, I watched the procession and the hospital evacuation scenes with a heavy heart. I saw parts of the rest of the movie unwillingly; the tension and flow of the movie is just that good. Unfortunately, whenever I became convinced that something bad surely would happen, my feelings came true.
I was heartbroken by the end of the movie. I felt psychologically sapped. The fact that the movie has a happy ending did not make up for the hurts along the way, especially in the penultimate scene. It's a curious movie, put together with two dissonant stories--Sydney's in New York dealing with survivor's guilt, Pran's in the rural countryside doing backbreaking labor under the threat of death--but it works.
As for the psychological picture of the Khmer Rouge and their ideology, Ngor's comments in his autobiography resonated with me as I watched the movie. The chhlop, the little girl he describes as shy and sweet when not filming and utterly transformed in the movie, did indeed look chilling, almost soulless as she supervised the workers and picked out which ones to punish. People say that children are innocent, and she was, but innocent in its most evil form, like a being with no conscience. In fact, the movie's focus on children was not just a decision meant to tug at the heartstrings of American audiences, but a choice that showed all parts of their involvement, including the backwards Khmer Rouge boys who had never seen things the city people took for granted. A lot of the soldiers were very young, something that Ngor talks about, but seeing it on screen reinforced the truth. Every time a soldier walked by who appeared to be about ten or twelve, it was frightening.
There's a scene in the middle of the movie when Dith Pran is shirking work. He's looking at a group of children being 'educated.' There's a stick finger drawing of a family unit on a blackboard: mother, father, two children, all holding hands. The Khmer Rouge official calls on a little boy to come up to the blackboard. He crosses out the family and erases the parts of the fingers which are touching so that the children no longer hold hands with the parents. To me, this scene encapsulates everything about the Khmer Rouge. It's funny how two little gestures, often seen in elementary schools, making x's on what is bad or what doesn't belong and erasing a small portion of something on a blackboard or whiteboard with a finger, can portray such brutality. That's the power of film at work.
I would recommend this film to anyone who wants to see a very authentic portrait of what Cambodia must have been like in the late '70s that comes along with a story of a great friendship. The violence and tension are reminiscent of other '80s movies; it is rated R for a reason, and it depicts people of all ages in hospitals or as trauma victims, but it's not unbearable. The acting is superb. The shots of the countryside are beautiful, even in the midst of war. It's very clear about America's failures regarding Cambodia, which may not be to everyone's tastes, but I don't think it's advancing an anti-American sentiment, just as acknowledgement that we (as yes, we are capable of) made the wrong decision about how to advance the stability of the region.
It's available on Amazon Instant Video, and a 30th anniversary edition has been released in Blu-ray.
