Cannes 2024: Rendez-vouz Avec Pol Pot makes evil the default state of the world

★★★★★ | Rithy Panh

There’s a moment in Rendez-vouz Avec Pol Pot (Meeting with Pol Pot) about halfway through the film, where you realize the director, Rithy Panh, has fooled us into complacency.

Earlier in the story, we’re introduced to a mock city, drafted by engineers of the Khmer Rouge, which clumsily promises a vision of the future. “The statue of Pol Pot must replace the religious icon,” one of the numerous men in charge demands. So they remove the carving of the statue, and set the equally flimsy one of Pol Pot in its place. Nothing tangible has occurred, yet it’s enough. The important part is the idea that something will happen.

Later, as our protagonists are escorted to one of the numerous closely guarded visits around Cambodia, we see them as these carved dolls. The locations are handcrafted and carefully selected. We see what the hosts want us to see. And then, halfway through the film, reality creeps in. There is no longer a sense of whimsy in their presentation. We realize that this is now our reality, a modelled world by those who have total control of all others.

I could feel my blood run cold in theater.

This is a remarkable film about evil, but also a nuanced and delicate study of complacency in the face of it. Part of it is based on factual accounts, yet most of it is fictional. Which doesn’t really matter, as in fiction, Panh discovers more truth than most ever could. Pahn is a documentary filmmaker with a long history of documenting the atrocities that took place in his native Cambodia. When he veers into fiction, it’s to highlight a greater truth. His unflinching gaze forces us to bear witness as well.

The film stars Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï as the three journalists out for an interview with the dictator. They are magnificent in their parts, yet the film belongs to Jacob. Her performance as the driven, questioning reporter who quickly understands the danger they’ve walked into is superlative. Colin, playing the most dedicated believer of Pol Pot’s ideology, is mesmerizing, especially as his childlike naïveté begins to crumble the further they get into the heart of darkness. Gueï‘s part is the smallest of the three, yet his clear-headed and frank portrait of a photographer at war with a regime who will not abide even a shred of evidence gives the film a clear moral compass. When he’s not on-screen, we feel adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

Panh paces his film with deliberate slowness. We watch as our protagonists wait and observe empty promises and carefully curated locations. History tells us how things ended. Panh is more interested in how people allow things to get to that point in the first place. It’s a combination of malice and complacency, both equally devastating. In a poignant scene, Jacob and Colin are escorted to an ascetic room with only a bed and rudimentary table. This is, their guide tells them, Pol Pot’s chambers. He comes here to sleep when he’s not leading the country. The room is immaculate. Nobody has ever slept a single night there. Colin is mesmerized; he wants to believe the dream, even as it’s clearly a falsehood. By the time we see where the leadership actually lives, it doesn’t come as a surprise. But watch how Colin plays the quiet devastation like a child disappointed in their parents for the first time.

This is a tremendous film; ferocious and disarming in its stillness. It understands how easily we fall into acts of evil, and how quickly we can justify that evil to ourselves by calling it the greater good. By focusing on a singular event, Panh’s film comments on larger issues by never allowing us to escape from the labyrinth. We recognize the same patterns occurring today across the planet as we continue to ask how could something like this happen.