Roland Joffé (1984)
Roland Joffé’s account of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime is a prodigious feat of logistics. It’s wonderfully photographed and edited, by Chris Menges and Jim Clark respectively. Mike Oldfield’s score avoids grandiosity, much of the time anyway. The Killing Fields comes up short because its characters – the non-Cambodians, that is – aren’t integrated with the grimly authentic context that Joffé creates.
Bruce Robinson’s screenplay is based on a work of non-fiction, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, by the New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose relationship with the title character of his book (first published in 1980) is the heart of the film. Schanberg (Sam Waterston) first arrives in Phnom Penh in 1973, during the civil war between the Cambodian national army and the communist Khmer Rouge. Dith Pran (Haing S Ngor), himself a journalist, is also Schanberg’s interpreter. He, Schanberg and photographer Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) are placed under arrest, though only temporarily, when Rockoff takes pictures of the killing of Khmer Rouge operatives. The action soon moves forward to 1975, the time of Pol Pot’s takeover. Schanberg secures evacuation for Pran and his family; his wife and their children leave Cambodia but Pran insists on staying in Phnom Penh to assist his American friend. When Schanberg and Rockoff are again arrested and threatened with execution, it’s Pran who successfully negotiates for their lives to be spared. The trio takes refuge, along with other journalists and medics (played by Athol Fugard, Patrick Malahide, Bill Paterson and Julian Sands), in the French embassy. The Khmer Rouge orders all Cambodian citizens there to be handed over. After the failure of desperately ingenious attempts to forge a British passport for Pran, he’s turned over to the new regime.
Back in America, Schanberg, with no idea of his interpreter’s fate, starts a campaign to locate him but this gains little momentum. One of millions coerced into ‘Year Zero’ forced labour, Pran shows continuing resource and resistance in the prison conditions in which he lives. As the ‘disappearance’ of intellectuals gathers force, he feigns simple-mindedness. He tries to escape; while on the run, he stumbles into one of the regime’s ‘killing fields’. After being recaptured, he’s assigned to a new prison compound and works for a man called Phat (Monirak Sisawath), now disillusioned with the Khmer Rouge and who increasingly entrusts his young son to Pran’s care. After intervening to try to prevent hardline regime officers from killing his colleagues, Phat himself is shot dead. In the ensuing confusion, Pran escapes the compound with Phat’s son and others. A long trek through the jungle begins, which Pran alone survives. In New York, Schanberg eventually receives news that Pran is alive and a refugee in a Red Cross camp on the border with Thailand. Schanberg flies out to the camp, where he and Pran are reunited.
The impressive kinetic passages of The Killing Fields bring to mind those of The Deer Hunter (1978) and the two are worth comparing in another way. Michael Cimino’s film is far from flawless but the hour-long wedding episode with which it begins ensures that, by the time the young men played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage arrive in Vietnam, the viewer knows them as individuals and understands them to embody a particular set of American values. In purely realistic terms, it’s perhaps questionable that these three friends in a Pennsylvania steel town are part of the same army unit in Vietnam: the audience accepts this because we accept the trio as their culture’s representatives in the story. Besides, Cimino’s fictional characters are more believable than the real people interpreted by Sam Waterston and John Malkovich in The Killing Fields, able as both actors are. The Sydney Schanberg of the film comes across as a hollow invention to place at the centre of a conscience drama. Receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war in Cambodia, he criticises American foreign policy and says that Dith Pran should be sharing the Pulitzer. Afterwards, Schanberg is confronted by Rockoff, who accuses him of using Pran to win the award and of not now doing enough to try and find him. This exchange and Schanberg’s subsequent, soul-searching conversation with his sister (Joanna Merlin) are worse than phony and mechanical: their prominence in the narrative is offensive. Next to the Khmer Rouge atrocities and their effects on the Cambodian people, Schanberg’s moral anguish is of minor importance.
I hadn’t seen The Killing Fields since soon after its original release; it was showing at BFI in their regular ‘Member Picks’ slot and the handout for the screening began with a quote from the member who made this pick: ‘An important piece of history, which should be kept alive’. No arguing with the sentiment and Roland Joffé’s picture has lost none of its quasi-documentary power but is biographical drama the best way of keeping history alive? The form has a tendency to limit and distort historical perspective – this film does, at any rate. Even Dith Pran’s gripping story is told by means of well-used tropes of other movie genres – the suspense around the fake passport, the repeatedly perilous jungle journey, against-all-odds survival – though it gains greatly in authenticity because Pran is incarnated by Haing S Ngor. As well as proving himself a fine actor, Ngor was an actual survivor of the Cambodian prison camps (it’s a savage irony that in 1996 he was shot dead outside his Los Angeles home). The reality he carries with him on screen is a big part of what makes the closing scene of The Killing Fields emotionally potent: the final embrace between Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran is moving. It would be even more moving without the plaintive accompaniment of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, a cliché even by 1984.
19 January 2022
