The films of the Cambodian director Rithy Panh, known for his documentaries (“The Missing Picture”), are haunted by his childhood years living under the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. “Meeting With Pol Pot,” his new dramatized feature, approaches the topic from the outside looking in.
In 1978, the journalist Elizabeth Becker — then a correspondent for The Washington Post, later a reporter and editor at The New York Times — was part of a group of Westerners allowed into Cambodia, which had been sealed off since the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. “Meeting With Pol Pot,” billed as “freely inspired” by Becker’s 1986 book, “When the War Was Over,” centers on a fictionalized version of that delegation.
It begins with three French journalists flying into Cambodia; from the start, when they don’t land where they expected, something is off. Alain (Grégoire Colin), who trumpets his friendship with Pol Pot from their time as student activists in Paris, insists that they are privileged to visit and should follow the rules.
The writer Lise (Irène Jacob) and the photojournalist Paul (Cyril Gueï) are more skeptical: Lise wonders where the intellectuals are and why the civilians remain eerily silent. Paul wanders off on his own to get the real story, rather than the show that the regime is clearly putting on.
Panh powerfully interweaves real footage of starvation and mass death — sometimes projecting it behind the characters or matching it to Paul’s eyeline. He also brings back the main conceit of “The Missing Picture,” which used clay figurines to depict certain events. What remains hidden is crucial in Panh’s movies. When Alain and Pol Pot have their long-deferred reunion, the dictator’s face is kept in shadow.
Meeting With Pol Pot
Not rated. In French and Cambodian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters.
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