Tag: Cambodia

Last Night I Saw You Smiling (Yub menh bong keunh oun nho nhim)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The White Building, built in 1963 by the Cambodian government in collaboration with the French-Russian architect Vladimir Bodiansky, was once a true example of proper low-cost housing and New Khmer architecture. In 1975, the building was abandoned when the brutal Khmer Rouge cleared the capital city of Phnom Penh, only for it to become a hub for artists and civil servants after 1978. Afterwards the once grand building fell into disrepair, lined with prostitutes and drug addicts. Documentary Last Night I Saw You Smiling shows us the final days of the building after it’s bought by a Japanese company with help from the Cambodian government and all 493 families are slowly cleared out.

Like in Hotel Jugoslavija (Nicolas Wagnières, 2017), this single building is used to explore the state of a nation; both as it exists in reality and as it existed in the people’s popular imagination. Old ladies show us pictures of the building as it used to be, their warm nostalgia aptly complemented by sentimental songs playing over the radio.

Last Night I Saw You Smiling

Cambodian resident Kavich Neang may have a personal stake in the matter — his own father is a resident of the building — but he takes an inclusive approach to depicting its residents. Spanning from young, seemingly oblivious, kids running up and down the hallways to old ladies complaining that they have nowhere else to go, Last Night I Saw You Smiling paints a panoramic and melodic picture of a place slowly fading from view, doubling up as commentary on a world that ultimately favours capitalist over socialist values.

For inhabitants who have strong memories of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, these developments are doubly-painful. It’s as if the government hasn’t learned any lessons from its past. As one inhabitant says, it feels like the same thing, only this time they have trucks, have to clear out the rooms themselves, and are getting paid for their troubles. While the government may use the money payout as justification for the redevelopment, it’s evident that the cheques aren’t big enough. Some even arrive too late for some residents who cannot afford to move any of their things. Additionally, while the disused nature of the building may have justified its redevelopment, the fact that these residents are given little say in the matter leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Using boxy, static frames, Kavich Neang allows his subjects to speak for themselves, even when they’re not saying anything at all. Whether its watching TV, listening to the radio, bickering amongst themselves, or cleaning up, we get a true sense of an authentic lived-in place. By slowly accumulating these images on top of each other, the failures of government policy are quietly laid bare. Now construction has begun on a new 21-storey building, totalling $80 million. The film doesn’t directly state whether any of these former residents will be able to afford one of these fancy new apartments. Yet it doesn’t need to. It speaks entirely for itself.

Hex

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Holidaying in Cambodia with Isaac (Ross McCall), Ben (Kelly Blatz) is getting over his father’s death. He runs into and falls for fellow Bostonian holidaying abroad Amber (Jenny Boyd) who after getting rid of him as fast as possible when he first attempts to pick her up, makes amends and comes on to him in a bar, where he’s hanging out with male friends.

She takes him back to her room for an unexpected topless exposure, a scantily clad embrace and no actual sexual congress.

The next day, Ben spots Amber having a spat with another Westerner and quickly gets into a fight with the latter – which situation swiftly escalates as Ben and Amber are walking away and the other man snatches a meat cleaver off a local and races after them. Cue a breathtaking chase through various narrow back alleys. Amber drags Ben in through a doorway and to his surprise, in a scene that would probably have made Hitchcock extremely happy, unbuttons Ben’s belt and gives him a blow job. It’s difficult to believe it’s the same woman.

And of course, that’s the twist – Amber has a scar indicting she was separated from her then twin at birth: she lived, her twin died. Yet lurking within Amber is another entity… her twin sister?… or something else?

One odd sequence has Amber sexually assaulted in one location (buttons being undone by an unseen force as she writhes and squirms, clearly having an unpleasant experience, while elsewhere in his car the meat cleaver-wielding assailant from earlier is locked in his vehicle – again by unseen forces – and subjected to loud music bursting from the car radio and subjected to an unpleasant fate. But that doesn’t prevent him from later spotting Ben at a local dance bar, getting him drugged (with Amber’s help? – it’s not clear) and attempting to exact revenge on Ben later on.

As Isaac and friends head off North and Ben stays behind, Amber’s behaviour becomes increasingly polarised, with the film throwing in for good measure her epilepsy and a Cambodian couple running a local medicine shop.

It’s a funny mixture of a white man’s Western view of Cambodia – beautiful Western females to sleep/fall in love with, evil spirits, medicinal hocus pocus and more, an outsider’s view of the culture rather than an insider’s.

The script provides a number of elements that might explain what besets Amber and while the finale wraps everything up neatly, a number of the elements present never really lead anywhere. The characters are believable and the performances adequate, the whole thing working well enough as a once only view on download without being anything truly memorable. The result is an efficient horror that succeeds in item modest aims but has little to say beyond satisfying its (white? male?) audience as an efficient yet vacuous exercise in generic horror.

Hex plays in the Raindance Film Festival. Watch the teaser swimming pool scene film trailer below: