Arts
A double image
Peter Ackroyd
There have been several films about the recent wars in South. East Asia, many of them genuinely if rather coldly spectacu- lar. And it was perhaps in reaction to these American-inspired epics that David Putt- nam, the producer of this film, has de- scribed The Killing Fields as `about a friendship' rather than about Cambodia and its fate. But this is really the problem — when the film is cumbersome and awkward, which it sometimes is, it is on those occasions when the narrative is look- ing in both directions at once.
The friendship in question is that be- tween two journalists covering the civil war in Cambodia: Sydney Schanberg was the New York Times correspondent in Pnom Penh who employed as his translator and assistant Dith Pran, a Cambodian. When the Khmer Rouge invade the capital, Pran elects to remain with Schanberg and in fact saves him from execution; and yet, in the end, Pran himself is forced to leave the
shelter of the French embassy and to become part of the forced migration into the countryside. Schanberg, guilty and dismayed, returns to the United States. This is the essential story of the film, and yet it is one which is set against a narrative which tries to encompass the events of the period — from the first American bombing to the inauguration of `Year Zero' by the Communist government. And so the scope of the film is at least equal to its ambition: the director, Roland Joffe, has tried to combine private drama and historical spectacle in equal measure.
There is no doubt that, as an orchestra- tor of the larger scenes, he is very skilful. The great set pieces, such as the evacuation of the Americans and the arrival of the Khmer Rouge, are put together with enor- mous fluency; and his picture of Cambodia under the rule of the 'Party', a rule which depends upon the smoking barrel of the gun, is both horrifying and persuasive (a much better evocation of authoritarian terror than, for example, in the recent film version of 1984). Joffe is clearly adept at a kind of cinematic heightening and there were times, in fact, when it seemed almost too `well done' — when the cinematogra- phy, for example, was so attractive that it drew attention away from the raw and bloody nature of the film. For The Killing Fields, as its title suggests, has its fill of horrors: the scenes of carnage were very effective, although it was not always clear to what use they were being put. The history and context of that carnage were never properly explained — and violence, without any examination of the situation which provoked it, comes perilously close to being melodrama or sensationalism for its own sake.
And this is part of a larger problem which might be described as a failure of historical imagination, a problem most clearly revealed in the presentation of the central characters: Sam Waterston turns Sydney Schanberg into a rather unpleasant man but this is not particularly important (except to Schanberg himself) beside the fact that there is an immediate lowering of temperature whenever he appears on the screen. The scenes between him and Dith Pran (played by Haing Ngnor), which ought to be at the heart of the film .1f Puttnam is correct in his description of It, are characteristically flat and uninterest- ing. But this failure is not of their own making, since it is implicit in the nature of The Killing Fields: quite simply, the plight does not really match up to that of Cambodia itself, and it is very hard to concentrate upon them as individuals when they are presented against so bloody and catastrophic a background. The same difficulty seems to have beset the director since, although his deployment of historical spectacle is always interesting, there is a certain failure of tone when he concentrates upon his two protagonists -- a failure exemplified by the fact that the corniest violin music is used to emphasise their parting and (worst vulgarity of all, In the context) a John Lennon song is em- ployed to accompany their eventual re" union. Such misuse of music only confirms another irony in a film which is trying t9 look both ways at once: the journalists story has a conventionally 'happy' ending where that of the country does not. It is perhaps a weakness of the cinematic imagination that the fate of Cambodia should be used as a vehicle for the explora' tion of individual psychologies, although there is no reason why the two subjects cannot properly be combined. There were occasions where there was no discrepancy
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even here: when Schanberg believes WM' self to be in imminent danger of death front. the Khmer Rouge, and when Pran Is subjugated to the rural demands of the. party (watching others being shot around him), the horror of their situation matches the horror of the.country in which they are, dwelling. When the film is not abut!' friendship, but about individuals in ex., tremity, private drama can become emblem of the public one: there is a precise equilibrium at such moments. But when
Pran and Schanberg are rushing around the countryside looking for a story, or endless- ly meditating on Pran's passport photo- graph, their private anxieties become top intrusive: they are acceptable when they merge with the background, less than interesting when they are placed in the foreground.
That is why The Killing Fields is such an awkward film, in which two things seem to be happening: the historical tragedy is on occasions reduced to purely private terms, and the private situation itself is sometimes invested with an historical significance -which it cannot really carry. Cambodia is described at the beginning of the film as another world, a secret world'; but you do not make it any the less 'secret' when you use it as the setting for a friendship, however beleaguered or 'representative' that friendship may be.
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