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‘Meeting With Pol Pot’ Review: Reality Unravels in Rithy Panh’s Haunting Historical Fiction
In Rithy Panh's 'Meeting With Pol Pot,' three French journalists are invited to interview Cambodia's dictator, in a tale of paranoia and propaganda.
Although its outcomes echo the real experiences of Becker, Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell, and American reporter Richard Dudman, the film is as much about a specific moment in time as it is about the mechanics of propaganda, which it refutes and embodies in equal measure. The group is rounded out by Cyril Guei as Paul Thomas, a Black photographer whose only resemblance to the white Dudman is a background detail about the latter’s time covering Vietnam, which Panh yanks into the foreground at a vital third-act development that treats history like a fluid folk tale. When the journalists are introduced to the government’s plans for a historical facelift (including replacing certain religious sites with statues of Pot), they’re shown these propositions in the form of carved miniatures — little toys which come to represent ideas in the absence of something tangible.
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