A remarkable film that deserves to be viewed and that recalls a barbaric moment in the history of a country.
When there's a war, there's bound to be a film about what happened during that same war. Human conflicts have always fueled the film industry. It's something instinctive, we are attracted to the horror of carnage at the same time that we feel guilty about it, and we get tired of condemning violence and cruelty. I think that only those who have lived through a war have the ability to overcome this paradox, not only because of the memories evoked, sometimes traumatic, but also because of the awareness that there is nothing truly beautiful about this.
What happened in Cambodia (and Rwanda, Bosnia and other countries) was much worse than a war. It was a genocide, a crime against humanity carried out due to the political fanaticism of a small group of “men” who tried to impose their own vision of the world and kill anyone who disagreed. What this film does is give us a flavor of what happened, bringing us the true (obviously fictionalized) story of a Cambodian journalist who, in 1973, saved the lives of a group of colleagues from the West, but ended up being left behind. behind, imprisoned in a Cambodian prison camp.
I think I wouldn't be incorrect if I said that, considering the documentaries I've seen on the subject, the film shows a very light and attenuated view of the cruelties that happened there at the time. Roland Joffé balanced it well, giving the film a raw realism without making it excessively graphic, and focusing on the emotional charge, on the emotions that everything can awaken in the audience. We don't need to see more than what we see to feel the pain of those people and the fear they went through.
Sam Waterston does an interesting job as an American journalist who desperately tries to find the man to whom he feels he owes his life. Julian Sands and John Malkovich also appear, but they don't have much time or material to stand out, limiting themselves to what they can do. Who is in the spotlight, with all merit, is Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian actor who gave life to the central character of this story and who knew very well the horror that his country had gone through: he himself had seen the realities that he interpreted as actor, and had been a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. Therefore, there is a painful load of realism in his interpretation that permeates the screen and reaches us, and to which we cannot and cannot remain indifferent.
Technically, the film is perfect: filmed mostly in Thailand, it makes good use of the settings and creates something we can believe in. The sets and costumes are the most realistic there is, and the cinematography is a bit reminiscent of those old war films in Vietnam. There are good special effects and some anthology-worthy scenes, such as the one that shows us the prison camps and the “brainwashing” that their captors were subject to force. The soundtrack is not always effective, sometimes it sounds excessively melodramatic, but it is the only drawback to a remarkable production, which deserves to be seen, again and again.
