Disturbing film about Cambodian "Year Zero" (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (4 April 2003)

For many Americans, Southeastern Asian history ends in 1973 with the fall of Vietnam. But S. Vietnam wasn't the only government we were propping up in the area. When Lan Nol's Cambodian govt went under in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over. Originally hailed as liberators, they responded to the cheers by emptying the entire population of Phnom Penh into the countryside and through a combination of murder, starvation and sheer economic stupidity, killed almost all of them. This is the backdrop of Joffe's film and it's greatly to its credit that it doesn't let the Cambodian holocaust overwhelm the entire story.
Oldfield's score is particularly effective at evoking the sense of impending doom as the last American helicopters vanish into the sky. It's too bad he didn't fully flesh out the rest of the film score as well as he did these scenes. More than even the suberb acting, his music creates the mood of a world spinning out of control.
The movie has an excellent pace--quick, tense, never becoming boring or pausing to lecture us about what happened. We don't get dry statistics about the killing fields--we get a scene in a dead swamp full of dried out, weathered tree stumps, and the remains of thousands of victims. As some other people have noticed, the tendency to blame the US for what happened is a bit heavy-handed (not to mention wrong). The real guilty party wasn't Nixon, but a man called "Pol Pot" who doesn't show up in the movie, but whose evil influence via the "Angkar" is omnipresent.
The movie is primarily the story of a Cambodian reporter named Dith Tran who covered the pre-1975 war along with a NY reporter (played by Waterson). Unwilling to flee the country when he had a chance, he instead chooses to stay in Phnom Penh and after a desperate attempt to forge a British passport for him fails, is captured by the Khmer Rouge and sent to a work camp. He escapes, and by following his escape across Cambodia into Thailand, Joffe shows us the fate of Cambodia after Angkar's "Year Zero" in which the Khmer Rouge attempted to obliterate any memory of how things had been before their takeover. There are numerous disturbing scenes of children holding weapons or taking part in executions. This isn't an exageration. The Khmer Rouge looked to the youngest part of the population as the hope of the future since they hadn't been contaminated by capitalist thought. They also had to have a source of manpower, so many adults having died even before 1975 during the communist insurgency and the US bombings.
While the movie had a happy ending, Cambodia did not. The chaos continued for years, Pol Pot was never tried for his crimes, and the devastating poverty left in the wake of "Year Zero" reduced Cambodia to an absolute destitution that it is still trying to climb out of. There's no great moral lesson here: just a powerful film about two reporters a Cambodian and American and what happens when a country implodes on itself.
RstJ