HORROR AND PATHOS
HOW WE CAN CALL CRUELTY IN A REVOLUTION AS CRUEL AS KHMER ROUGE INHUMAN WHEN HUMANS SO OFTEN ACT THIS WAY?
In 1976, the ruthless communists of t he Khmer Rouge are moving peacefully i nto Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Their troops pour in by the truckload, some of them obviously teenagers, all of them with guns. Loudspeakers announce to the city dwellers that the Americans are about to bomb them and everyone must leave for three days. “You’ll be safe in the countryside,” they reassure the crowds of confused citizens. Then they can come home again.
These three heartless lies — the bombing, the return home and the safe countryside — set the tone of dishonest oppression in this tragedy. That’s the beginning of a touching, heartbreaking and deeply credible film, now running on Netflix: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.
The first character we focus on, and the first who arouses our feelings, is a man named Ung, the father of seven children. His face tells us he’s terrified. He’s been an employee of the government that the Khmer Rouge is defeating and is therefore designated for execution should the invaders discover his identity. We hear him try to assure his kids, “It’s going to be all right.” However, there’s a deep well of pathos in his words. He knows there’s no chance that anything will be all right again.
Still, as a father he realizes his manly job is to appear calm and unafraid. The children will follow his example. The Khmer Rouge are herding hundreds of families out of the city and into the jungle. Ung realizes he and his family must not step out of line. He hurries the children along, and at one point tells them, “Stay quiet and do what they say.”
At t hat point and many others this Cambodian disaster begins to resemble many previous versions of genocide. We don’t know from the film that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge will turn into a lethal dictatorship responsible for the death of about a quarter of Cambodians; the film doesn’t even mention him. But in the father’s request that his children do as the guards tell them we can recognize instructions given by fathers in similar circumstances.
How many times, i n how many climates, have fathers talked that way while imagining that if orders are followed things may not turn out as badly as they might otherwise? How many times did Armenian fathers say something like that in the 1920s; or Jewish fathers in the 1940s? And how many times have fathers like me thanked the universe for the fact that my children have never once been threatened the way Ung’s are threatened? We often speak as if peace should be the normal state of the world, but so far, experience teaches us that peace, when it comes, is a miracle.
The team leaders tell their captive families that a new civilization has been born. Under the Khmer Rouge there are no rich people and no poor people. There are no private possessions, no banks, and no capitalists. All possessions are to be given over to the new government.
They instruct the people to gather berries whose juice can be turned into a black dye. Then they are told to dye all of their clothes black. Soon everyone seems to be wearing the same grey or black garments. The team leader announces that col- our is a vanity of the West. It has no place here. Even the smallest pleasures, the pleasures that cost nearly nothing, must be taken from them so that they will understand that they have no power, no right even to object to anything. Everything has changed. “Our country is in our hands,” a team leader boasts.
One young man is denounced because he’s used French medicine to cure his son’s dangerous fever. That’s wrong. He should have used traditional Cambodian medicine. He sobs with anguish while confessing this sin.
The parade across the countryside arrives at a place where the guards have discovered some saffron-clad Buddhist monks. They press the monks into hard labour, replacing oxen, and do their best to shame them. “What do you monks contribute? Nothing!” Monks are considered parasites and leeches. What doesn’t fit into Khmer Rouge dogma has no value.
We see most of the action in the film as reflected in the astonishingly intelligent eyes of Sareum Srey Moch ( in her first film). She plays Loung Ung, the author of the autobiography that forms the basis of the film. Seen through the bewilderment of one child, it’s more moving than it would be if it dealt mainly through fearful adults.
Angelina Jolie collaborated with Ung on the screenplay and expertly directed the film. Watching it, I wondered how we can we think about — how we can we judge — the cruelty inherent in a revolution as mean, angry and purposeful as Khmer Rouge. We want to call it inhuman, but in truth humans often act this way.
The film lasts more than two hours and there are moments when I found the pain hard to deal with. In the end, though, I found it a rare and impressive achievement.