FILM REVIEW: THE MISSING PICTURE

A scene from The Missing Picture.

Phnom Penh, mon amour

By John Esther

One of my favorite films of 2013, writer-director Rithy Pahn film is finally getting a proper release in the United States. 

On April 17, 1975, the 13-year-old Panh, his family and others were evacuated from Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, to the countryside where they could finally learn what it meant to be loyal to the Khmer Rouge. A pseudo-communist regime, the Khmer Rouge was anti-bourgeois in the extreme. While they shared a similar distaste for middle-class materialism that many left-wing groups did, they took it to the extreme and out of context. All comfort was anti-revolutionary. 

More importantly, as a peasant uprising run amok, the Khmer Rouge was horribly anti-intellectual. Learning beyond man as a tool for the agrarian socialist revolution was subversive and must be eliminated by any means necessary. According to the Khmer Rouge, and their leader Pol Pot, who was actually an educated person, people of culture, humanities, the arts, music, literature, etc., were better off dead. The supposed left had become extremely right. 

This would be one of the lessons Panh would learn over the next four years as nearly all of his family perished one way or another. And to his credit, he emphasizes how deadly a mistrust of the intellect existed in the country.

Since nearly everything was destroyed during those years, Pahn recreated his childhood memories through the use of figurines. A painstaking endeavor, Pahn uses hundreds of figurines set in elaborate dioramas to convey his characters and extras.

The result is a stunning mediation on loss and memory, with no shortage of anger to boost the narrative.

Paradoxically, this was Cambodia’s Oscar entry for this year’s Oscars in the Best Film in a Foreign Language category, but it lost to Italy’s much happier, bourgeois-friendly and inferior film, The Great Beauty.

FILM REVIEW: CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH

A scene from City of Life and Death.

Flow our tears the testimonies read

By John Esther

As Hitler and company were busy turning Europe into an abattoir their non-Occidental bootstrapping companions in the land of the rising sun marched into Nanjing, China, December 1937 to conquer, rape, steal and kill their purportedly racial inferiors.

Boiling with racial hatred, the Japanese Imperial Army systematically, randomly, wantonly killed thousands of Chinese civilians and soldiers who had already surrendered. As the Chinese city canvas swirls and whirlpools into a fury of reductive madness, a group of Chinese and Europeans are allowed to create a Safety Zone where the sick, sad and surrendered are safe from the sickness, sadism and spurious violence outside the gates. But that can only last so long.

Based on recorded witness testimony, writer-director Lu Chuan (Missing Gun; Kekexili, Mountain Patrol) plays out the atrocities in smart fashion by portraying the madness of fascism, racism, sexism and war from both the Chinese as well as Japanese perspectives, sympathizing with both sides but damningly indicting the Japanese Imperial Army for its unforgivable behavior. In other words: Yes, I see what you went through; you still royally fucked up and you better know it. Stuff does not just happen.

Superior to the 2009 film somewhat covering the same material, John Rabe, the latest film by one of China's most impressive "newer" directors (City of Life and Death is Chuan's third film), is an anti-war film of a higher order, thanks to Chuan's stellar screenplay and direction uncovering the internal and external realities of unfettered violence, the haunting colors by director of photographer Cao Yu, Lai Qizhen's stunning sound design and a cast of wonderful actors including, Liu Ye, Hideo Nakaizumi, Gao Yuanyuan, Beverly Peckous, Qin Lan and Yao Di.

On the other hand, John Paisley as John Rabe gives a terrible performance but, it is interesting to note, he is much older and nowhere as heroic than Ulrich Tukur in John Rabe. Tukur gave a much better performance, too.

But Tukur's performance is the only thing to recommend John Rabe over City of Life of Death.