Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll (USA/Cambodia/France, 2014)

Don't Think I've Forgotten paints a portrait of Phnom Penh in the years running up to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia as a rapidly modernizing city with a rich, cosmopolitan culture. The end of French colonial rule in 1955 had lead to a period of increased artistic freedom, with Prince Sihanouk, a composer and singer himself, being one of the most vocal cheerleaders for the new renaissance. It was also a time of relative peace for the country, Sihanouk having so far been able to maintain a position of neutrality vis a vis the war in neighboring Vietnam.

The integral role of music in Cambodian culture, and a healthy influx of pop records from across the globe, insured that Cambodian popular music in particular would thrive during this time. Director John Pirrozi spends the first half of his film chronicling the various genres that developed, starting in the 1950s with the "adult pop" of crooner Sin Sisamouth and his frequent duet partner, the mesmerizing Ros Serey Sothea. From there he moves on to Ye Ye and French pop inspired acts like Huoy Meas, the impish Pen Ran and then to the emergence of “teenage music”' with Shadows-inspired guitar instrumental bands like Baksei Cham Krong. Finally, in the late 60s, come bands like Dakkar, who were influenced by the harder sounds of the records being brought over from the U.S. by American G.I.s.

If you have seen Golden Slumbers, Davy Chou's powerful documentary on Cambodian cinema's brief golden age, you know the turn that this narrative is going to take, and see the villain on the horizon whose shadow will make it impossible for you to regard this story of musical discovery with anything but grim trepidation. In 1970, amid the panic and confusion caused by the U.S. bombings, Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup. Cambodia plunged into civil war and, in the resulting chaos, a foothold on power was gained by the Khmer Rouge, a sect whose nihilistic brand of communism had no place in it for long haired rock and roll types.

When Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his forces arrived in Phnom Penh, they wasted no time in making clear that they considered themselves to be, not saviors, but an occupying army. The citizens were driven from the city, many of them, regardless of vocation, to become forced farm laborers as the Khmer Rouge strove to convert Cambodia to an agrarian economy. Among the luckiest was Dy Saveth, a beloved film actress who managed to get on a flight to France, where she would work as a maid for a number of years. The least lucky were slaughtered.

Given the care that Pirrozi takes in communicating the vibrancy of the Cambodian music scene at the time--combining expertly edited file footage of go-go dancers and crowded nightclubs with performance clips and fond reminiscences from the survivors--the naming of the dead that follows is excruciating. In keeping with the film's title, the director, rather than hammering us over the head with the tragedy, puts his best efforts toward giving us a sense of what was lost. Thus, every familiar name that makes up this list--and the aforementioned Sin Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea, Huoy Meas, and Pen Ram are all among those killed--cuts even deeper.

By now, the words “Khmer Rouge” and “Pol Pot” have become synonyms for genocide and brutal oppression, and it would be tempting for a filmmaker to see them as providing their own context. For this reason, Pirrozi is to be commended for taking pains to outline the political context of his film’s events, including interview snippets with historians and government officials among those with artists and fellow travelers. Even for someone familiar with that history, this serves to evoke a more dimensional picture of the times—as well as making painfully clear the bubble-like fragility of Cambodia’s position as an island of peace within the ocean of war and unrest that was Southeast Asia in the late 60s.

Pirrozi also deserves props for not letting the Sihanouk regime off the hook and—as the Prince himself would no doubt prefer—portraying them as well-meaning victims of history. In other words, there were good reasons that so many workers threw their lot in with the Khmer Rouge in the beginning. Nonetheless, I doubt that so many of them would have done so had they known that the Pol Pot regime’s programs would leave in their wake a tally of their murdered countrymen that numbered in the millions.

World cinema abounds with stories of Rock and Roll’s liberating power, with various permutations of the leather clad guitar slinger facing off against The Man in his many guises; punitive school boards, repressive clergy, greedy record executives, Satan himself (I’m looking at you, Jon Mikl Thor), etc. In almost every case, rock’s raw authenticity and emotional power triumphs over the innate bogusness of anything that stands in opposition to it. In Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, we see the true story of Cambodian pop musicians—a polite and mild mannered lot, to my eyes—who are no match for a perverted authority who sees their extermination as an expression of its core beliefs, and that is absolutely unrestricted in the level of atrocity it will employ in doing so. It would be nice, at this point, to see a King Creole figure descend from the rafters to teach Pol Pot and his crew how to do the boogaloo, leading us into a rousing musical finale in which all is forgiven and all differences are set aside. Sadly, life just doesn’t work that way.

Nieng Arp (Cambodia, 2004)

It’s a wonder that any innovation at all takes place within the monster film genre, seeing as there is always a new generation of young viewers for whom all the old creatures can be trotted out and run through their familiar paces. And this is no truer for the United States than it is for Cambodia, where the horror thriller Nieng Arp became a surprise hit in 2004, running in theaters for a solid three months.

Nieng Arp concerns the folkloric beastie known to Cambodians as the Arp (or Ap), which will be familiar to 4DK readers as the Krasue from Thailand’s Ghost of Guts Eater, the “Flying Evil” from Taiwan’s Witch With Flying Head, and the Leak from Indonesia’s Mystics in Bali. If you are too lazy to click those links, you will be none the wiser—unless, of course, you are unable to click them because you are a levitating, disembodied head with all of your entrails dangling out of your neck hole, in which case you know what an Arp is, because you are one. Nieng Arp’s subtitles further put a bow on things by translating “Arp” somewhat awkwardly as “Bodiless Vampire.”

Our story gets under way when village girl Maya and her boyfriend are attacked by a trio of randy local hooligans as they walk through the forest at night. The boyfriend is killed and Maya is raped and left for dead. It is at this moment that an Arp just happens to fly by and “turns” Maya by dribbling some kind of goop inter her mouth from hers. Next, a subtitle appears telling us that 16 years have passed, and the fact that this is a horror movie made in the 2000’s is announced by the arrival of a vanload of boisterous college students from Pnom Penh, who are in the Battambang Province for a study tour of the area’s shrines.

This group is as lazily drawn as precedent would have you expect (the Fat Girl is pushy, constantly eats, and gets diarrhea—and there’s a gay guy named “Pompy”), but it has to be said that the purpose of their visit provides the film with most of its visual highlights. The lush, antiquity-strewn locations through which the group tours are indeed beautiful, even if they provide the impetus for some frankly enervating travelogue sequences. First-timer Kam Chanty proves himself to be yet another novice director who can’t resist the allure of a good stairway. Thus do we watch in real time as our little group fully ascends a steep hillside to the accompaniment of light pop rock.

When it comes time for the gang to seek out their accommodations, we come to a hostel overseen by none other than Maya, played by an actress whose likeness to Suzzanna cannot be mere coincidence. Maya shares the home with Paulika, her teenage daughter. Paulika is, by all appearances, a normal teenage girl, to the extent that one might suspect she is the victim of some kind of Marilyn Munster syndrome. Mom, meanwhile, keeps her head’s tendency to go airborne on the down low—until, that is, Satha (Sovan Makara), the hunk of the visiting group, starts to woo Paulika. In a turn of events that is almost Bollywood-like in its providence, Maya somehow divines that Satha is the descendant of one of her rapists--at which point no amount of pleading from Paulika, nor solemn intervention by the village monks, can stop her.

When it comes to reviewing Nieng Arp, I find myself with a bit of a dilemma on my hands. That is because I have a strong suspicion that, in the process of transferring the film to the VCD on which I watched it, a couple of the reels were placed out of sequence. Certain scenes on the second disc are clearly from earlier in the film, and set up events that have already taken place—with, at the time, mysterious causation. These might be intended as flashbacks, or some kind of Tarantino-esque experiment with fragmented narrative, but, if so, they are poorly realized. Then again, it could all be just an accident beyond the filmmakers’ control (in which case, they can register a complaint via the phone number that helpfully scrolls across the bottom of the screen virtually the whole fucking time). Who am I to judge?

What I will say is this: With its homemade, shot-on-video feel, crude special effects, and religious conservatism, Nieng Arp reminds me of nothing so much as one of those evangelical horror films made in Nigeria or Ghanna. You can gauge your likely reaction to it by just how much more of B14 or 666: Beware the End is at Hand you could watch than their trailers. Nieng Arp, of course, might have the benefit of making a little more narrative sense than those movies, were it the case that the time-shifting in it that I witnessed was unintentional.

Anyway, after a good bit of Maya chasing the terrified students through the forest and slapping the back of their heads with her intestines, she calls out to the ghost of the Arp who made her for aid. This cackling crone proceeds to inhabit the bodies of the kids one by one and make them murder one another. Among her victims is a girl named Prathana, who betrays a pre-existing evil streak by wearing a bootleg tee-shirt that says “MIGKEY MOOSE” on it.

The VCD of Nieng Arp wraps up with a blooper reel of the cast muffing their lines and breaking character to much hilarity. It’s charming, to be sure, but to my mind unnecessary to providing the film with a happy ending. I’ve elsewhere dedicated no small amount of text to grieving the tragic end that befell Cambodia’s cinematic golden age of the 60s and 70s. After the ravages of Pol Pot (whose name is evoked in Nieng Arp as yet another shiver-inducing bogey man), the revival of that cinema was fitful and protracted, with a few bright spots amid long periods of dormancy. One of the brightest of those spots was the success of Nieng Arp, which, along with a number of other low budget horror features, prompted an uptick in film production and theater attendance in the country. All in all, it’s a heartening example of how exploitation cinema, with all its commerce-driven perseverance, can sometimes tow a nation’s entire film industry behind it into safer waters.

Chompa Toung (Cambodia, 1974)

I’m beginning to think that the only thing verifiable about Chompa Toung is that it exists. Depending on which source you trust, it was either directed by Lim Buh Lun or by its star, Dy Saveth -- who, if so, likely also produced under the banner of Sovann Kiry, the production company she founded with her director husband Hui Keung. It’s also based on either a traditional Cambodian fairy tale and/or a poem by nineteenth century monarch/writer hyphenate King Ang Duong.

It also appears that Chompa Toung was intended as a sequel, at least in spirit, to 1972’s pan Asian hit Crocodile Man. That is not to say that there’s any explicit connection to Crocodile Man’s characters or story, however, at least as far as I can ascertain. There is a crocodile, to be sure, and maybe even a brief sequence recapping the earlier film’s events, though of that last I can’t be entirely certain. There were no subtitles, you see. Thus I come to you equipped to write, not a review, but at best only a cautionary tale.

Not that you, being a sensible person free of significant head injury, need to be warned off of watching an untranslated Khmer language feature dependant almost exclusively upon dialog to move its plot forward. And this is without mentioning that the version of Chompa Toung currently available on YouTube is of the washed-out and heavily pocked variety that makes a surviving film feel more lost than found. Furthermore, the film’s tirelessly insistent musical score, which seems to shift randomly from traditional Cambodian folk sounds to funk to pop without pause, has the potential to be a little alienating (especially without the distraction of actually understanding what people are saying to take your mind off it), as does the fact that so much of the movie is padded with nature footage that was clearly shot off of a TV screen.

This is not to say, however, that Chompa Toung lacks completely the naïve movie magic that leant Crocodile Man so much of its charm. For instance, the film includes a cloud dwelling deity who intervenes in human affairs by way of hand projected auras that are scratched directly onto the film, and the goofy looking crocodile puppet from the first film makes a welcome, if brief, return. I also think that a kitten was turned into a human woman at some point. But aside from that, a lot of what you’re going to see is lengthy scenes of conversations shot on tiny, albeit colorful, sets. The fairy tale aspect of the story, which requires the involvement of various and sundry princes, princesses and kings, further guarantees that an inordinate number of those conversations will involve commoners kneeling in supplication before their betters. So there’s that, if that’s your thing.

What I can understand of the story, based in part on the description of the original folk tale linked above, is that it involves the titular Chompa Toung, a beautiful young princess played by the beautiful young Dy Saveth. At the film’s outset we see Chompa cavorting on the beach with some of her friends/subjects/retainers, and learn that, when she laughs, she vomits flower petals, which, as you might imagine, looks pretty weird. One of her companions gives her a crocodile egg, which we later see has hatched and issued forth what will become a grown crocodile, which Chompa keeps in a pool within the palace walls. For some reason, one of her servants one day sees fit to free the crocodile, bringing unhappy results for many of the water loving common folk from the surrounding area and their extremities.

Someone has to pay for this massacre, it seems, and it turns out that someone is Chompa, who, in the company of her kitten/nurse, is set adrift on a raft and banished from the kingdom. From here things seem to diverge from the original tale a bit. It appears that the two women are captured by an ogre in the service of some kind of demon king (perhaps, in fact, the crocodile given human form?), and Chompa is subsequently rescued by a handsome prince played by Khmer superstar Kong Som Eun. Then some kind of super baby is issued as a result of their (apparent/off-screen) union, which someone tries to bury in a box. Your guess is as good as mine, really. All I know is that all this required a lot of kneeling, beseeching and supplicating on behalf of a lot of people, and a lot of considered chin stroking on the part of the royals charged with assessing the rhetorical weight of said groveling.

I clearly need to have movies like Chompa Toung come along and baffle me from time to time. It cures me of any hubris I might have stemming from my familiarity with genre, and the idea that that could somehow provide a Rosetta Stone for understanding films regardless of their linguistic inscrutability. I mean, sure, the language of cinema is universal, but it turns out that language language is still pretty important. Just ask someone who can understand Chompa Toung, to whom its survival might very well be kind of a big deal. The fact that it has the power to pimp slap me into humility is also of value, of course, but it’s not the only reason I’m glad it exists.

Neang Sak Pus, aka Snake Haired Girl (Cambodia, 197?)

I’d never claim that there weren’t benefits to living in the West, but one way in which we definitely pale in comparison to Asia is in the area of snake-based folklore. Such tales of snake women, snake-like women, and snakes and the women who love them have provided inspiration for colorful fantasy films on the part of film industries everywhere from India to Indonesia to Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, the Khmer language cinema of Cambodia also embraced that subject matter during its brief golden age, with Neang Sak Pus being a solid example of the result. Meanwhile, America continues to wow the world with output like Mega-Python vs. Gatoroid.

Like the previously reviewed Crocodile Man, Neang Sak Pus was the product of Khmer cinema power couple Dy Saveth and Hui Keung, the married actors, producers and sometime directors whose company Sovann Kiry produced numerous popular films in the years leading up to Pol Pot’s takeover. In 1970, the ubiquitous Saveth had starred in the similarly themed Puos Keng Kang, aka The Snake King’s Wife, a movie that went on to massive success throughout Southeast Asia and spawned a string of official and unofficial sequels starring the actress. In the case of Neang Sak Pus, Saveth stars, while Hui Keung directs, although the Chinese subbed print that I watched credits him under his pseudonym Chin Wan.

Neang Sak Pus begins as the tale of two adulterous lovers who engage a sorcerer to do away with their respective spouses. Upon the death of the woman’s wealthy husband, the two are married, only for the woman to find that it is her virtuous sister, Ah-hua (Saveth), whom her lover truly has eyes for. Despite the fact that these attentions are unwanted by Ah-hua, the enraged sister has her servants drag the poor girl to a remote cave and toss her into a snake pit. It turns out, however, that the resident snakes have interests in Ah-hua other than biting her, and that those interests are sexy interests. As a result, Ah-hua later dies in the process of birthing a baby which the snakes then raise to adulthood. And, yes, that does mean that you get to thrill to the sight of an actual human baby surrounded by many actual live snakes, because Asian cinema does not fuck around when it comes to things like that.

Skip forward a few years, and that baby has grown up to be Dy Saveth (again), resplendent in a Flinstones style mini and crop top and a hat that looks like an oversized shower cap. This snake-spawned lass, who will come to be known as Ah-mei, is an untarnished creature of nature, unlearned in the Ways of Man, who swings from vine to vine like Tarzan. And it is in the course of doing just that that she comes to the attention of Lung (Kong Sam Oeun), the handsome son of the very woman who condemned Ah-mei’s mother to that snake pit in the first place. Despite Ah-mei’s inability to express herself in anything other than snake talk, love blossoms between the two -- that is until Lung accidentally knocks off Ah-mei’s hat to reveal, to his horror, that her hair is a mass of living snakes (and, at least in part, real ones, by the looks of it). Eventually, of course, true love wins out over visceral repulsion and the lovers are reunited, though sadly not before Lung’s parents have decided to turn to the black arts in order to drive them apart.

I should note that Dy Saveth’s portrayal of Neang Sak Pus’ titular character -- as a childlike innocent who is, at her worst, only playfully mischievous -- is worlds away from the more typically spine chilling snake ladies we’ve seen personified by the likes of Indonesian horror queen Suzzanna. In fact, for much of its running time, there’s a kind of sweetness to the film’s treatment of the romance between its central couple –- a sort of boy meets snake girl, boy loses snake girl, boy fights to win snake girl back tale. And then, during its final act, Neang Sak Pus takes an abrupt turn into what will probably be rough waters for some viewers, essentially taking us on a grizzly tour of regional folk magic at its most visceral and potentially alienating.

This begins when Lung’s parents, convinced that their son has been possessed against his will, consult with a trio of shaman, who are then shown performing a lengthy ritual that involves them driving long needles through their cheeks and slicing their tongues with daggers. Later, in another ceremony, a live rabbit is beheaded onscreen. It is these types of rituals that were exploited and exoticized in the Shaw Brothers’ Hong Kong produced Black Magic films during the 1970s (the popularity of which might explain why Neang Sak Pus received a Mandarin subtitled home video release), though coming to them here, aware of the deeply held belief in black magic that still holds sway throughout much of Southeast Asia, their depiction is leant a matter-of-factness that gives them an even greater power to disturb. It also doesn’t help that none of the mutilations depicted appear to be simulated.

Still, I’m gladdened to spoil that, despite such grueling trials, love triumphs over all at the end of Neang Sak Pus, if then only with the help of an army of vengeful snakes. Evil is smote and the lovers are reunited, convinced by their tribulations to leave the world of humanity behind for good. It’s a blandly satisfying conclusion that anyone can relate to. And, as with Crocodile Man, no small amount of guileless charm has been exhibited in the course of getting us there -- even if that charm, for the uninitiated viewer, sits somewhat uneasily alongside the film’s harsher documentary content. (Though it always behooves the uninitiated viewer to remind him/herself that it’s really not about him/her anyway.) I have to admit, though, that the tension between the two energies gives the film overall something of a welcome charge, like a reminder that magic doesn’t just fuel fairy tales, but nightmares as well.

Crocodile Man (Cambodia, 1972)

Last week I had the opportunity to see Golden Slumbers, Davy Chou’s powerful documentary about the brief golden age of Cambodian popular cinema. As the film tells us, Cambodia produced nearly four hundred films between 1960 and 1975, many of them fanciful mythologicals brought to life by way of some primitive but nonetheless charming movie magic. Of course, such entertainments had no place within the medieval worldview of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and, once that group seized power, the industry and its practitioners quickly fell victim to the murderous purges that followed. That very few of those aforementioned four hundred films survive today is no less heartbreaking for being unsurprising; it’s hard enough to contemplate the loss of national film history in the cases of countries like Thailand and the Philippines, but when that loss is symptomatic of the systematic annihilation of an entire society, it’s more than a matter of cinephiles crying in their beer over the pesky impermanence of celluloid.

That 1972’s Crocodile Man is among those few Khmer language films from the era that do survive today is likely due to its popularity beyond Cambodia’s borders. In addition to being a success at home, it was also distributed in Hong Kong and -- thanks at least in part to its basis in Thai folklore -- also saw release in neighboring Thailand. In fact, its source material was also used as the basis for the 1980 Thai film Kraithong, from Sompote Saengduenchai’s Chaiyo productions -- not to mention it’s 1985 sequel –- as well as another Thai film of the same name produced in 2001.

Crocodile Man was produced by the studio Sovann Kiry Pheap Yun, a partnership between Dy Saveth, who was at the time the most popular -- and hence most continuously employed -- actress in Cambodia, and her then-husband, Hui Keung, who was both an actor and director. Due to her high profile, Saveth takes top billing in the film in spite of her limited screen time, while Hui Keung, in addition to directing, takes on the more meaty role, I think, of Chalawan, the movie’s titular crocodile man. The film would be just one of roughly one hundred that Saveth would star in during the period, necessitating a schedule that often saw her shooting two or three films at a time.

One of a couple of ways in which Crocodile Man departs from Chaiyo’s later Thai language treatment of the tale is how it eschews the latter’s “hero’s journey” style narrative in favor of presenting its titular character as more of a tragic figure -- one who, at least at first, is cast into the villain’s role as a result of a sad misunderstanding. The other is how Hui Keung chooses to frame the story within the context of a traditional martial arts narrative. As such, our two central characters, Kraithong and Chalawan, are first presented to us as the star pupils of one of those wizened kung fu masters we are so used to seeing in Taiwanese and Hong Kong movies from the day. This master, we learn, is in possession of a magical tome which he has expressly forbidden his students to read, thus setting the stage for Chalawan, his curiosity getting the better of him, sneaking into the shrine and taking a peek anyway.

From the book, Chalawan learns how to transform himself into a very large crocodile, a feat which he is eager to demonstrate to his fellow students at the soonest opportunity. Unfortunately, when he does, the frightened students run off and leave him stuck in his crocodile form. By the time the master learns of his fate, it is too late for Chalawan to be helped, and so the master makes the best of an unhappy situation by using Chalawan as a means of conveyance, riding him up and down the Mekong on his various errands. One of these errands involves the fetching of curatives for Takao Kaew (Saveth), the sick daughter of a local nobleman, and it is on this occasion that Chalawan has a confrontation with one of the notoriously hostile crocodiles from nearby Snake Island. In order to avoid injury in the ensuing melee, the master insists that Chalawan swallow him, stressing that he must be regurgitated within three days lest he starve to death within the croc’s bowels. Unfortunately, the fight lasts seven days.

When the mute Chalawan returns to shore and coughs up the master’s undigested remains, his fellow pupils leap to a pretty understandable conclusion. Kraithong beats the animal mercilessly, driving him back out to sea, and then vows that, upon completing his training, he will seek vengeance of a far more permanent nature upon Chalawan. In a sequence teeming with Diver Dan caliber underwater effects, Chalawan is then taken to a magical undersea cave by an old sea hermit, wherein he is able to assume human form. After hooking him up with a pair of comely underwater brides, the hermit then proceeds to help Chalawan in honing his magical skills, until he becomes the most powerful creature in the sea -- with that last being an important stipulation. Meanwhile, Kraithong’s training at the hands of a new master has made him the most powerful fighter on land, with the corresponding stipulation that, for him to remain undefeated, he must avoid his opponents drawing him into the water. Of course, all of these finicky dictates get thrown out the window when Chalawan, in an act of vengeance, kidnaps the beautiful Takao Kaew and drags her back to his submarine kingdom.

I have to admit that my feelings about Crocodile Man are colored considerably by my having so recently viewed Chou’s documentary. After all, taken on its surface, the film is a fairly lighthearted fantasy with, at times, an admittedly ramshackle level of technical execution. The giant puppet used to represent Chalawan in his crocodile form is patently silly looking, especially in contrast to the film’s fitful use of stock footage of actual crocodiles, and many of the depicted feats of kung fu mastery are achieved by low rent camera tricks such as showing people jumping out of trees in reverse motion. Still, when one reflects upon the fact that, within a few years of the film’s making, many of those involved would either be murdered or in exile, the carefree feeling and exuberant sloppiness achieved by such effects gains a poignancy that’s almost too much to bear.

Dy Saveth and Hui Keung managed to flee Cambodia in the days leading up to the Khmer Rouge’s arrival in Phnom Penh, with Saveth eventually ending up in France and taking work as a nanny. She has since returned to Cambodia, where she now teaches at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. In Golden Slumbers, she talks about how she uses her collection of old stills and handbills as a means of remembering the friends and colleagues she lost. I imagine that Crocodile Man could also serve as such a means of remembrance -- which is quite a noble burden to bear for a film that I might otherwise describe as “fun” and, yes, perhaps even a bit dumb. But memory, loss and tragedy have a way of making powerful talismans out of even the slightest things. And if, somewhere in that process, Crocodile Man gained an almost exquisite bitter-sweetness that it was never intended to have, we are no less obligated to admire it as such.