Review of First They Killed My Father (2017)
Seen in 2021.
Seen mostly at 150 % speed.
Khmer Rouge atrocities as seen by a small Cambodian child from the city.
Slow even with acceleration, aside from the one battle scene. I wonder whether the pace is inspired by Shoah (1985), as if slowness alone had the power to invoke the horror of the regime. It doesn’t. It’s just the experience of one kid, stylized both in retrospect and for an international audience by US director Angelina Jolie, who had her own kid on as one of thirteen producers. This is the kind of thing Hollywood entertainers do to appear more woke and Oscar-y.
I sense little understanding of the story being told. The plot doesn’t begin until a character makes a meaningful choice, which is halfway through the movie, when the mother sends the kids off in different directions. It is a lie that the Angkar kills the father first; they kill Keav before the father disappears and the later scene of the father’s death is only imagined. The motives of the Angkar are totally unexamined. There is nothing here with the immediacy of The Killing Fields (1984), and none of the darker child psychology of Beasts of No Nation (2015) etc.
The handiwork is not terrible, but inexcusably bland. For instance, to show that the protagonist remembers a happier time before the junta, there’s a flashback where everybody she knows is smiling and laughing, which is hardly what a child in that situation would actually think about. It’s just the most readily available image of human happiness in the mind of the script’s writer. It’s not completely useless as cinematic testimony on the junta, but it is boring.