Jolie’s film has its guard down and its blood up
First They Killed My Father
15 cert, 136 min
Angelina Jolie Starring Sareum Srey Moch, Phoeung Kompheak, Sveng Socheata, Tharoth Sam
Of all the specific struggles faced by women filmmakers, simply getting projects off the ground is one of the most relentless. But it doesn’t seem to have afflicted Angelina Jolie, who has directed four features in the last six years – an output rate comparable to Christopher Nolan’s. Jolie’s extraordinary fame and influence as an actress has presumably helped grease the wheels along the way, even on projects that haven’t, in retrospect, felt like natural fits.
You could hardly accuse her 2015 marriage-in-crisis drama By the Sea, in which she co-starred with Brad Pitt, of lacking personal resonance. But as you watched, you sometimes sensed Jolie was directing in the way she thought she should, rather than just getting on with it. First They Killed My Father, which is being released simultaneously in cinemas and on the streaming service Netflix, feels different.
This adaptation of the Cambodian writer Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir of the Khmer Rouge coup and genocide of the Seventies is a film on its toes – nimble, vivid and lyrical, with its guard down and its blood up.
Acted entirely in the Khmer language, it centres on a quietly riveting performance from Sareum Srey Moch, a nine-year-old first-time actress discovered by Jolie during a nownotorious casting process involving emotionally gruelling role-play. She plays the young Loung, the daughter of a military police officer (Phoeung Kompheak) whose ties to the deposed authoritarian government made him a target for the merciless new communist regime. As the Khmer Rouge sweeps to power, Loung and her family join a mass cross-country exodus, which leads to tense encounters at military checkpoints, spells in enforced labour camps, and worse.
Cambodia is a subject close to Jolie’s heart. She fell for the country while shooting Tomb Raider there in 2000 – and it’s also the birthplace of her 16-year-old adopted son Maddox, who is credited, perhaps a little eyebrow raisingly, as an executive producer. But the film’s perspective is admirably untouristic. Like Loung, you spend much of the film absorbing the upheaval from a child’s-eye-view, your gaze flitting between details that are surreal and ghoulish. (The extent to which Loung is affected by both what she sees and the relentless Maoist propaganda is left chillingly vague.)
Orange-robed monks forced at gunpoint to till rice paddies like cattle, child soldiers planting landmines as attentively as root vegetables – many of the images here, dazzlingly captured by the Slumdog Millionaire cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, really pierce and stick.
Perhaps because Loung is largely a passive witness, the film ultimately feels more instructive than moving – its horrors don’t accumulate so much as segue one into the next. But it’s carried off with both conviction and style – and it has the air of a passion project, certainly, but never a vanity one.