It's powerful: Reviewing Angelina Jolie's new Cambodia movie

Of the various kinds of films to address genocide, the biopic is probably the most familiar. We’ve all seen them: “based on a true story”, popular but prestigious, making a vast atrocity comprehensible through the eyes of an individual. The Killing Fields (1984), Schindler’s List (1994) and Hotel Rwanda (2004) are all classic examples, though there are much earlier ones – Ravished Armenia introduced Western audiences to the Armenian genocide as long ago as 1919, for instance.

Angelina Jolie’s new film, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, fits into this subgenre in many ways. On general international release on Friday September 14, simultaneously in cinemas and Netflix, it is an adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoir of the same name from 2000. The book was an unsettlingly beautiful yet harrowing chronicle of a young girl’s experience under the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror from 1975-79.
Like many other historical dramas, “based on a true story” is not the only way in which Jolie secures the film’s authenticity. Ung contributed to the promotion of the film, and even appeared in it at the end – recalling Schindler’s List’s pairing of actual survivors with their actor counterparts.

The promotional materials make clear that the film was shot on location in Cambodia, and that producer, Rithy Panh, is a survivor of the genocide himself. He has made several ground-breaking documentaries about the atrocities, plus his own cinematic memoir, The Missing Picture (2013). And finally, Jolie is not entirely an outsider – she was spurred to her humanitarian work after filming Tomb Raider (2001) in Cambodia, and also has a son from the country (who has a credit as a producer on the new movie).
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Meri Pyaari Bindu: Hardly profound but gives you a smile and sense of loss

Abhi (Ayushmann Khurrana) first saw Bindu (Parineeti Chopra) when he was six years old. The year was 1983, India had just won the World Cup, and she was his new neighbour. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight; Abhi was too young to understand love (who isn’t?), but he remembers that as a moment when something clicked, as if two pieces met in a jigsaw puzzle, revealing a pattern and meaning of sorts, promising the others would follow suit, too. The film then follows Abhi, over the next three-and-a-half decades, trying to make sense of the puzzle that refuses to leave him.

Meri Pyaari Bindu, starring Khurrana and Chopra, has a fairly simple story to tell. Boy meets girl. They become close friends, sharing secrets and lunch, childhood and adolescence. And then, they grow up. Bindu falls for a football player. Abhi registers a protest so quiet that Bindu is unaware. Aided by the rush of testosterone, he moves on too, finding a fling here and there. But like his most prized possession, a cassette of old Hindi film songs, Abhi, too, gets stuck at times: on Bindu, his past, the two of them cocooned in a bubble. And then—the film shows it simply and quietly—life happens. They part ways. A few years later, they try to keep in touch, but places, people and jobs keep them occupied; the fondness remains, the e-mails dwindle.

Most Bollywood romantic dramas concentrate on their leads as they’re falling in love. We know what the boy feels about the girl, and vice-versa, but we don’t quite know who they’re, individually, as people. What happens in a love story when the love, or the partner, is absent—or, at least, not present? Meri Pyaari Bindu attempts to disentangle some of that mess. And it does so through smart storytelling, cutting from past to present, from blissful memories to quiet disappointments.
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