Revered French filmmaker Patrice Leconte attempts to craft a wordless documentary in the vein of Koyannisqatsi but generally misses the boat, its visual artistry hampered by a vague, simplistic "message". Had this been made by Cambodian filmmakers, I might be obliged to think differently, as undoubtedly they would have, too. Granted, it's full of pretty imagery (mostly of poor people, of course) and a sweeping (though inappropriately leading) tragi-operatic score by a massive European orchestra with choir seen on screen at regular intervals, most inappropriately at the end. There's a French subheading/tagline for the film that translates directly to "Open Your Eyes" which indicates that -- in spite of defenders who think the film deserves a more exalted reputation because of its music and imagery alone, or those who see no editorializing going on -- Leconte clearly WAS trying to make a "statement" with this film, a la such broader-canvassed productions as the aforementioned Koyannisqatsi, Baraka or Chronos. But where the directors of those films made that message one part of a larger commentary on our crazy world, and usually contrasted it with imagery of bustling, technology-choked metropolises and the like, Leconte seems to have thought that a vanilla travelogue of seemingly random yet very carefully selected scenes of lower-class, rural Cambodian malaise and ennui (read: people staring into the distance not realizing they're being filmed) set to an emotionally-charged choral musical backdrop would be enough to "open the eyes" of his audience to how the have-nots of East Asia really live. Instead, his show comes off like the work of a (typically white-privileged) 20-something millennial Social Justice Warrior whose sense of righteousness and predictable reverence for all things East Asian is not matched by a well-informed understanding of his host country and what sets him apart from the unwitting people he's essentially exploiting for profit. Apart from pictorially, DOGORA doesn't seem like the work of an accomplished auteur like Leconte. It's a tourist video with an "epic" soundtrack -- by the noticeably all-white Bulgarian State Orchestra -- layered in to "open your eyes" to its rather shallow, ill-defined "message": that the indifferent, often bored-looking faces of rural and small-town Cambodians going about their day-to-day lives are actually the face of a people locked in some kind of eternal struggle that the filmmaker doesn't actually identify.
Review of Dogora - Ouvrons les yeux
