King-Father and His Cinema

By Tianzi Harrison Oct 17, 2012
Asian Correspondent

What kind of a story will King-Father Sihanouk tell of his life if he, like everyone else as the Khmer people believe, reincarnates? Is he the privileged royal kid who happens to have an expensive hobby? Is he the fantastical king who reigns by his art? Is he a classic tragic hero brought forth by a paradigm shift? I wonder.

His Majesty Sihanouk has written, produced, and directed over 30 feature films during his lifetime. He sometimes acted in them with his wife and children, who had to be goaded into doing it by him. He was so devoted to his art that comparisons with his parents, who were both musicians, and his daughter, who was a superb dancer easily call to mind a family resemblance. It really runs in the family, does it not?

Like its neighbors, Cambodia was in a political turmoil through much of the second half of the last century. Gaining independence from France cost Sihanouk eight months in exile in Thailand. When the Vietnam War was brooding over the horizon, Sihanouk almost died from an assassination attempt. The King confessed in Frédéric Mitterrand and Jean-Baptiste Martin’s 1997 documentary that he had never read Marx, but the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic deposed him three years after the Cambodian Civil War broke out in the heat of Communism. After the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge used him briefly as a symbolic leader then spit him out.

This did not matter because Sihanouk wanted Cambodia to be an independent country more than he wanted himself to be the King. He had the Khmer people’s love and support, which were enough for the Khmer Rouge to come back to for a united front against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978 and set up their government on Cambodia’s soil. Sihanouk’s government in exile eventually settled peacefully with a pro-Vietnam government in 1991. He was welcomed back as the King and as the filmmaker who told authentic Khmer stories.

The magic of His Majesty’s cinema, remembered fondly by the Khmer people even now, is captured by as much historical referencing as the resplendent landscape of Cambodia. King Sihanouk did many location shootings for his films. His Royal Palace is often featured in them. He wrote lines for his wife to extol the beauty of Cambodian pagodas and its architecture. He wanted to inspire his people to love their art, history, and culture.

Romance is another unmistakable element in all of King Sihanouk’s films. King Sihanouk says in Mitterrand and Martin’s documentary about him that romance is “only a pretext of initiating people to Cambodia.” Perhaps he has stumbled upon the secret of making great war films there. Hopefully, I will have the chance to ask my favorite director Wong Kar-Wai about his film In the Mood for Love(2000) if he had known about King Sihanouk’s film-making career before the film, because its last scene is shot in Angkor Wat, the same place that King Sihanouk has set many of his stories.