The Film ''city Of Ghosts''

[mrentoul]

I saw a film on DVD last night, City of Ghosts, made by and starring Matt Dillon. It is filmed mainly in the Cambodian capital in Pnomh Penh. It's made in the film noir style, moody and atmospheric, but it has does have a storyline and characters, despite what some critics said.

Here's something from a review on the Net:

City of Ghosts, Matt Dillon's directorial debut, is a strangely moralistic romance, premised on his relationship with the setting, Cambodia. Dillon was inspired to shoot a movie there when he first visited the country in 1993. "Cambodia," he says, has a "dreamlike quality" or again, an "almost nightmarish quality," characterized by "extreme poverty and crime," as well as "a sense of danger."

How familiar does that sound to westerners living here who have read a few Bangkok-based novels?

Then this next bit:

But the veneration is filtered through a familiar combination of bad-idea inclinations -- to exoticize and also domesticate the setting. It would be cliched but partly accurate to say the "place itself" becomes a character. More to the point, the place itself is reimagined in a series of expatriates and locals, one more corrupt (or at least more confused) than the other.

I mention this film here because people who have been to Cambodia might be interested; but also because of obvious parallels with Thailand and the way westerners portray it in popular media.

City of Ghosts is billed as a thriller, but is caught between its heart-of-darknessy intrigue and touristy fascination with "otherness."

I haven't been to Cambodia, but some scenes look familiar: party-going westerners who hang around wats, speak none of the local language and make fools of themselves.

Couldn't resist that! The film is about a guy living in New York whom police suspect of insurance fraud. He travels to Cambodia to find his boss and mentor, played by James Caan. Other parts are played by Stellan Skarsgard and Gerard Depardieu.

It includes a scene where the lead guy travels to a brothel and finds lots of young girls sitting behind a glass tank. Dillon was impressed by this when he saw it in ''real life'' in Cambodia, and decided to shoot it more or less as he saw it. He can't have seen such places in Bangkok!

About five minutes of the film was shot in Bangkok, as Dillon's character makes his way from New York to Cambodia. It shows us a dusty, Chinatown-style street - none of the tall shiny buildings or shopping malls that we know also make up this modern city.

Several reviews made much of the fact that the Cambodia depicted in the film looks beautiful. Given that, and the number of tourists who travel to this part of the world, it's hard to believe that City of Ghosts is the first film (first American film?) to have shot its principal photography in Cambodia since the mid-1960s.

The film was shot mainly in the old colonial section of Phnom Penh. Another one of its key locations was Bokor Hill Station.

It stands at the summit of the Bokor Mountain overlooking the Gulf of Thailand in southern Cambodia. There stands an abandoned casino built by the French in the 1920s for wealthy Europeans. The casino is now a ghostly stucco structure covered in red lichen and home to a few stragglers from the former Khmer Rouge Army. During the Vietnam War, because of its fortress-like position, the Khmer Rouge used Bokor Casino for months to hold off the Vietnamese. It wasn't considered safe to visit until sometime after 1998. The interior walls are covered with graffiti and crude drawings done by the Khmer Rouge, left untouched for the filming.

Most of the westerners portrayed in the film are boorish. The film does include a memorable friendship between Dillon's character and a real-life Cambodian cyclo taxi driver whom he hired on set. But for the most part, as this review says, what Cambodia thinks of all expatriate activity this is a mystery, because ''the locals have hardly a thing to say about all these foreigners come to exploit them''.

Here's the review:

http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/c/c...of-ghosts.shtml

This review accuses the director of ''cultural racism'' and says it's rooted in an outsider's perspective:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/cityofghosts.htm

This site gives good background on shooting, locations, and local personalities hired for the film:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/CityofGhos...22095/about.php

The taxi driver, Sereyvuth Kem, approached Dillon looking for a fare but got a supporting role in the film instead.

His training including acting, English and driving lessons, as well as screenings of a cross-section of American films such as The Godfather, Forrest Gump, and There's Something About Mary.

Sereyvuth Kem's real-life experiences helped inspire and flesh out his character. Kem's father, who ran a medical clinic, was executed by the Khmer Rouge. As a child, he was left on his own. When he turned up at an orphanage in his mother's village, they told him to leave and that they had no room. "But I stayed anyway," says Sra, with a mischievous smile. "For ten years."

Many other local actors and non-actors were recruited to play minor and supporting roles. Loto, a famous midget comedian and one of the few actors to survive the Khmer Rouge, was hired to play a nightclub owner. Mr. Lee, a local Cambodian eccentric, was tagged to play himself. Buddhist monks graciously worked as extras in the temple scenes. Expats were cast as well, among them Michael Hayes, the American editor-in-chief of the Phnom Penh Post.

Here's a terrific interview with the driver, Sereyvuth Kem, from the Cambodia Daily. He was paid just $6000 for the part, but is now a star - even though his life as a driver has resumed where it left off.

http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodia.daily/se...ures/story1.htm

When he showed the film in Arizona, women's rights activists confronted Dillon about the young age of the prostitutes portrayed in the brothel scene. Sereyvuth Kem, whom Dillon invited to the states to promote the film, stepped in to defend it:

“It was for a dramatic point in the movie,” he explains. “We have the massage place like that. It is true in Cambodia. You don’t know about this?” he asks.

Here's TimeAsia's review:

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/art...-438933,00.html

Although many Asia hands advised Dillon to shoot in neighboring Thailand instead, he insisted that Cambodia, with its French-influenced architecture and postwar fragility, was a location that couldn't be substituted. "There are things you'd never worry about in other places—land-mine clearance, having roads rebuilt, getting real security," says Dillon. "But it's not like anywhere else, and I don't like it when people say that it is."

The 39-year-old actor-director conceived of the idea for City of Ghosts in the early 1990s while vacationing in Southeast Asia, where he met a slew of grizzled expatriates with shady pasts. Later, an International Herald Tribune story about felons hiding out in Cambodia due to its lack of extradition treaties further sparked his imagination.

And here's an interview (not a good one) with Dillon:

http://blackfilm.com/20030425/features/mattdillon.shtml

[NedKelly]

Where did you get the DVD ?

[mrentoul]

In Silom, I guess. I'll ask my Thai guy. He bought a bunch of them the other day and usually goes there.

[NedKelly]

Great !

[mrentoul]

My guy did indeed buy this film from a street vendor in Silom - but I imagine you can buy it all over the place.

[Oberkommando]

When he showed the film in Arizona, women's rights activists confronted Dillon about the young age of the prostitutes portrayed in the brothel scene. Sereyvuth Kem, whom Dillon invited to the states to promote the film, stepped in to defend it:

The Aussie guy that is going mad in the brothel scene is long term expat Snow and he runs an iconic bar on the other side of the river in Phnom Penh.

Unfortunately it is set to be demolished in the near future and Phnom Penh will lose one of it's most charming and alluring venues. I was there on Sunday night and it was mobbed out.

There are stills of the movie in Cantina Mexican restaurant on the Riverfront near the FCC too, for those that are interested.

[Ulysses G.]

I thought it was pretty realistic for the time period that I was traveling there fairly often (20 years ago). The only thing that really rang false to me is that they were supposed to be loaded with money, but stayed in a real dive of a hotel when much better ones were available.

I thought it was a good movie.

[farang000999]

I saw this film but only watched it once. I do remember thinking that the girls depicted in the brothel looked underage but also thinking that the brothel looked way too realistic for Matt Dillon to have created it and that it probably actually existed. It did not look staged.

The truth is that, imo, places like Bangkok and Cambodia tend to look much better on film then they look in real life.

[leininger]

I own dvd of this movie and have watched it more times than I can count It is one of my favorite movies. I think it is fairly realistic. I thought James Caan gave very good performance in this film.