[Tlc] L-film review

[justinm at ucr.edu]

FYI.
Thanks,
justin



2008-1121 - NYT - Convulsions of a Family and an Abandoned Country

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/movies/21betr.html

New York Times
Friday, November 21, 2008

The Betrayal (2008)
The Betrayal
Pandinlao Productions

Thavisouk Phrasavath and his mother in a scene from “The Betrayal” (“Nerakhoon”), a documentary directed by Ellen Kuras.
November 21, 2008

Convulsions of a Family and an Abandoned Country

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 21, 2008

The subjects addressed in “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon),” a documentary by Ellen Kuras, could hardly be more enormous: war, revolution, the abandonment of a nation and the scattering of its citizens. But the film, though it includes old news clips of the war in Laos and of American presidents discussing that country’s fate, is distinguished by an intimate mood and a lyrical tone. It is quiet, contemplative and impressionistic, which makes the story it has to tell all the more powerful.

That story belongs to Thavisouk Phrasavath, who is credited as Ms. Kuras’s co-director and who provides on-camera and voice-over narration. The son of a Laotian military officer who was part of the American-backed government, Mr. Phrasavath and his family fled their homeland not long after the Communist Pathet Lao insurgents came to power in 1975. After Mr. Phrasavath’s father disappeared into a re-education camp — for a “seminar,” in the chilling local euphemism — Mr. Phrasavath, his mother and most of his sisters and brothers made their way to Thailand and then to the United States, where they were deposited in a tough, gang-ridden section of Brooklyn.

Ms. Kuras first met Mr. Phrasavath around that time, and one of the most remarkable aspects of “The Betrayal” is a narrative span rare in documentaries.

Film shot almost a quarter-century ago flows into more recent images. Some middle years are missing, giving the film a haunting sense of discontinuity and intensifying the surprise of its unexpected turns. Mr. Phrasavath and his mother seem to age before our eyes, as he grows from a sullen adolescent with big 1980s hair into a sober and contemplative middle-aged man and she is pared down by time into a tough, weary matriarch.

A complicated, sometimes tragic chronicle emerges in “The Betrayal,” but the film is driven less by chronology or plot than by the expressive counterpoint of words, music and images. Ms. Kuras, making her debut as a director, has had a long and distinguished career as a cinematographer (her credits range from Tom Kalin’s “Swoon” to Michel Gondry’s “Be Kind Rewind”), and while “The Betrayal” is in some respects a memoir, it is also a work of visual art. The collaboration of the co-directors seems to consist precisely of the synthesis between his memories and her eye.

The result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation. The title, which at first seems straightforwardly to refer to the American government’s abandonment of its Laotian proxies, takes on deeper, sometimes contradictory meanings as “The Betrayal” (in Lao, “Nerakhoom”) unfolds. It refers to the actions of Mr. Phrasavath’s father, and also, more obliquely, to the loss of cohesion and identity suffered by exiled Laotians as their children drift into violence and materialism.

Mr. Phrasavath and Ms. Kuras address these complicated issues, and the feelings they evoke, with a patience and tact that sometimes feels a little too detached. But their purpose, finally, is not to traffic either in despair or easy uplift, but rather to write a film essay that takes account of pain, resilience and the sheer strangeness of recent history.

THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON)

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath; director of photography, Ms. Kuras; edited by Mr. Phrasavath; music by Howard Shore; produced by Ms. Kuras and Flora Fernandez-Marengo; released by Cinema Guild. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In English and Lao, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. This film is not rated.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
__._,_.___
Messages in this topic (1) 

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu