A Cambodian Holocaust

Rating: 7/10 (12 February 2006)

Whilst the war in Vietnam has produced dozens of Hollywood movies about that conflict, THE KILLING FIELDS remains the only film about the side show conflict in Cambodia and its consequences. Perhaps more unusually - and what few American viewers of this film realise - is that THE KILLING FIELDS is an entirely British production: written, produced and directed by English filmmakers with an entirely British production team on location in Thailand and funded largely in the UK and not Hollywood. The film, released 22 years ago now, won 3 Oscars and eight British Academy Awards (including Best Picture).
For that reason THE KILLING FIELDS - at least visually - rarely resembles a Hollywood studio product. Chris Menges' cinematography shoots in drab colour and uses what appears to be natural light. Roland Joffe's direction is documentary-like, always realistic and never over blown; and Bruce Robinson's screenplay avoids sentimentality and cliché.
The film takes place in Cambodia between 1973 and 1979 and focuses on the American journalist Syndey Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and his interpreter Dith Pran (Dr Haing S. Nor, a real life survivor of the atrocities depicted in the film). The initially scenes are slow - Schanberg and Pran finding a Cambodian village accidentally bombed by the USAAF. The centre of the film is the fall of Cambodia and Schanberg, Pran and the other Western Journalists' decision to stay behind. Pran saves their lives when they are captured by the Khmer Rouge and they subsequently hide in the French Embassy. Pran - as a Cambodian - must be handed over to the Khmer Rouge.
The final third of the film accounts the Cambodian holocaust, which is pure 1984, full of purges of the past and whole hearted obedience to the Party. Pran survives a rural labour camp and flees to Thailand, eventually being reunited with Schanberg in 1979.
The best sequence involves the attempts to get a photo of Pran so he can use it in a British passport and not be handed over to the Khmer Rouge (the ruse fails). The film never uses subtitles, so when long sequences are in Cambodian (such as when Pran negotiates the lives of the journalists) we are simply confused and don't know what is going on. Also, Robinson's screenplay never really develops any of the supporting characters - and Schanberg himself, despite a sincere performance from Waterston, is something of a one note grim character. The film is often slow and uninvolving when it should be tense and dramatic, and Mike Oldfield's score is simply awful.
So the KILLING FIELDS is a mixed experience. But despite these flaws, it remains a superior and important movie, well-made technically, but flawed dramatically.