No Lights, No Camera, No Action

‘Golden Slumbers,’ A Film About Cambodian Cinema

Icarus Films

“Golden Slumbers” gleans traces of the past through interviews with directors, like Ly Bun Yim, above, and a star actress.

By NICOLAS RAPOLD

The New York Times

Published: October 30, 2013

 

Often a documentary tackles a topic that, however tempting, poses visual challenges (or exhausts the imagination of the filmmaker). That problem is the focus of “Golden Slumbers,” a film about Cambodian cinema, a history wiped clean by the Khmer Rouge. In the hands of the filmmaker Davy Chou, that vanished past becomes a remembered fantasy, expressing the absence of much more than a couple of hundred missing melodramas.

Actors and directors were exiled or killed, films were destroyed, and cinemas were left to rot as part of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal purge (which has been the subject of other Cambodian documentaries, notably those of Rithy Panh). Mr. Chou, a grandson of a prominent producer from an earlier era, gleans traces of this erased history (mostly 1960-1975) by interviewing surviving directors (such as Ly Bun Yim) and a star actress, Dy Saveth, who is now a dance instructor. He tantalizingly postpones showing us clips from these lost films, or from providing the reassurance that any do or do not exist.

The film isn’t a dirge, though we’re not spared these filmmakers’ sense of loss (some of it still raw, or scarred over with a certain hardness). “Golden Slumbers” portrays the cinema of the past as a benevolent haunting spirit, using beautiful photography and contemplative long slow dolly shots. These techniques endow the film’s locales, alternately lush and barren, with a sense of wistful, even beautiful desolation. Songs from the missing films echo through “Golden Slumbers” as if the film itself were an empty old cinema.

The film’s gradual buildup blooms when a cinephile murmurs, half-surprised, that he remembers the faces of star actors from the past more than the faces of his own family. Mr. Chou taps into something profound about the dream life of a nation with this moment, as he does with shots of a cavernous former theater that became a makeshift residence (and that partly recalls the nook-filled theater in Tsai Ming-liang’s “Goodbye, Dragon Inn”).

That said, “Golden Slumbers” has a tendency to wallow in its romanticism, not to the point of trivializing its history, but definitely dropping off into somnolence. Its use of a structuring absence sometimes just comes across as a slackness in the film’s treatment. But as light, and unearthly, as the missing films may sound now (bearing titles like “Out of the Nest” or “The Sad Life”), Mr. Chou’s documentary shows how they are no trivial matter, even in the shadow of an inexpressibly terrible crime.

Golden Slumbers

Opens on Thursday in Manhattan.

Directed by Davy Chou; director of photography, Thomas Favel; edited by Laurent Leveneur; music by Jérôme Harré; produced by Jacky Goldberg; released by Icarus Films. At the Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at Second Street, East Village. In Khmer and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. This film is not rated.