FILM REVIEW: THE MISSING PICTURE

A scene from The Missing Picture.

Phnom Penh, mon amour

By John Esther

One of my favorite films of 2013, writer-director Rithy Pahn film is finally getting a proper release in the United States. 

On April 17, 1975, the 13-year-old Panh, his family and others were evacuated from Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, to the countryside where they could finally learn what it meant to be loyal to the Khmer Rouge. A pseudo-communist regime, the Khmer Rouge was anti-bourgeois in the extreme. While they shared a similar distaste for middle-class materialism that many left-wing groups did, they took it to the extreme and out of context. All comfort was anti-revolutionary. 

More importantly, as a peasant uprising run amok, the Khmer Rouge was horribly anti-intellectual. Learning beyond man as a tool for the agrarian socialist revolution was subversive and must be eliminated by any means necessary. According to the Khmer Rouge, and their leader Pol Pot, who was actually an educated person, people of culture, humanities, the arts, music, literature, etc., were better off dead. The supposed left had become extremely right. 

This would be one of the lessons Panh would learn over the next four years as nearly all of his family perished one way or another. And to his credit, he emphasizes how deadly a mistrust of the intellect existed in the country.

Since nearly everything was destroyed during those years, Pahn recreated his childhood memories through the use of figurines. A painstaking endeavor, Pahn uses hundreds of figurines set in elaborate dioramas to convey his characters and extras.

The result is a stunning mediation on loss and memory, with no shortage of anger to boost the narrative.

Paradoxically, this was Cambodia’s Oscar entry for this year’s Oscars in the Best Film in a Foreign Language category, but it lost to Italy’s much happier, bourgeois-friendly and inferior film, The Great Beauty.