‘SLEEPWALKING’ DVD DOCUMENTS MULTI-KULTI FANTASY

So maybe you’re a college student who listens to ‘indie’ music and you’ve heard a novelty song or two recently that you liked from the Cambo-American rock-a-delic ‘world music’ band Dengue Fever. And maybe you figured this is another case of some foreign model-cum-singer-cum-actress raised on English language and white bread working with some American musicians to provide her some backup and some LA street cred while she tries to parlay her good looks and sweet voice into some sort of Hollywood E-tainment career? Once she’s got some press, then maybe she’ll revert to the standard Celine solution of middle-road mainstream generic English-language pop mixed with an exotic foreign accent, maybe become an Anggun for America? Think again. For one thing, the band found her, not the other way around. For another thing, Ms. Nimol doesn’t model or act, so far as I know. She’s the real thing, niang srey Kampuchea jahk Battambang who’s seen her share of reality, and I don’t mean ‘American Idol’. Finally, and most importantly, this band is first and foremost about the music, not any hype that might rise and fall with the tides. Hopefully you listened to more than the one or two songs that made the college radio circuit and found in the larger oeuvre something that made you want to know more… and listen again…

Or maybe you’re like me, and you’ve been wanting to see this documentary film ever since you showed up at the Bangkok International Film Festival almost two years ago, scanned the schedules and saw a title from a song you knew and realized that this documentary you’d heard of was screening… yesterday! ­*&^%$#! Being a world music fan, you’d heard the rumors and legends, knew it had been documented on film, but not that it had already had its premier at the Silver Lake Film Festival in LA earlier in that year and now was in the other ‘City of Angels’ (Krung Thep). Since then it’s been playing the festival circuit and universities and museums (never coinciding with my schedule btw), wherever there might be interest in an off-beat documentary that’s stylistically straight-forward, but about a real-life story that’s the stuff of multi-kulti musical fantasy. I mean, come on now- musician and friend wander through the Cambodian outback, then friend gets sick, whereupon they stumble on to an incredible long-lost musical genre? Musician and musician brother then search for a Khmer karaoke queen who unknowingly carries the musical gene, find her, and finally convince her to sing for an American public who have no idea what to expect when this band of freaks hits the stage? Yeah, right, and it’s coming soon to a theatre near me, starring both Harrison Ford AND Brendan Fraser, yada yada blah blah. Cut to chase scene. Cut to happy ending. FADE TO BLACK. Great log line yeah, but who’s gonna’ buy that script?

What’s that, you say? You’re not a college student who listens to indie music? And you’re not like me, some half-crazed hack with a laptop and a passport full of visas? Why not? So what in the holy Hell am I talking about? Perhaps a word or two of explanation is in order. Here’s the Reader’s Digest™ condensed version: musician DID discover an incredible long lost musical genre in Kampuchea, though it’s definitely a polished urban style, not rural gantreum. Now there are a lot of foreign musical genres out there that have yet to be properly documented, much less marketed, and many have come and gone with little notice. What makes 60’s Cambodian pop so unusual is: 1) this is from the early 60’s. Most Western pop music didn’t get heavily exported until the 70’s when R&R became Big Business; 2) 60’s Cambodian pop disappeared because most of its proponents themselves disappeared in Pol Pot’s myopic sui-genocidal attempt to remake Cambodian society in his own perverted image; and 3) the music is GOOD; I mean really really GOOD.

Dengue Fever’s early remakes only give you a glimpse into that era and a hint of the breadth of that genre. Fortunately the old videotapes still exist, can be ordered, and you can watch the Cambodian equivalent of American Bandstand for hours on end, the Cambodian counterparts to Paul Anka, Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, Neil Sedaka, etc. singing some of the best pop music ever produced, apparently without a clue that what they were doing was something special in the cultural history of the world. Apparently they kept playing right up to the moment when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge/K’mai Grahorm mustered their forces on the city’s outskirts, without a clue as to what was about to happen. The rest is history; it wasn’t pretty. People had a hard time smiling the first time I visited in 1998.

Or you can go to Sihanoukville like me and instead of hanging out on the beach or in bars, you can watch it all on Cambodian TV nonstop. But you said you’re not like me, didn’t you? Then you might want to cut to the happy ending and get a copy of Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. To continue: After becoming hooked on the music, musician and brother musician DID look for a Cambodian singer and finally found one right in Long Beach’s own Khmer neighborhood. She’s Ch’hom Nimol. The rest is history, this time prettier. Not only did the band find a groove, but also a common cause in wanting almost immediately to take the music back to its source in Kampuchea, almost as if to ask for its blessing. By 2005 after all, Kampuchean people finally had something to smile about, what with beaucoup Chinese investment money and memories that had finally laid down their weapons after Pol Pot’s death.

This is the story that Sleepwalking Through the Mekong documents. Soon after forming, soon after finding a place on the soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s City of Ghosts about a foreigner’s misadventures in Kampuchea, but long before finding a real audience for their eclectic brand of music, Dengue Fever went to Phnom Penh to play for the locals during the Bon Om Dteuk water festival. Director John Pirozzi’s experience with music videos and as a cinematographer in feature-length films, including City of Ghosts, serves him well here, mostly in focusing on the esthetic potentials of both the music and the landscape, and letting the story tell itself. In the best documentaries after all a script emerges only after the shooting has taken place and available footage is diced and spliced. This usually involves reams of footage to be culled through, resulting in a very high footage-to-final cut ratio, vis a vis narratives. Here I suspect that ratio is much slimmer and may account for the rather unusual 67 minute length, too long for a short film and too short for a full-length one. If this is a problem for presenters, it’s certainly not for viewers. Why add filler to a story that tells itself in its own good time, or worse still, cut-to-fit? This is the MySpace era after all, the new musical democracy. Can a film democracy be far behind? Give YouTube some time.

This whole project must have come out of some late-night conspiracies during down time on location for City of Ghosts, and the aspect of ‘winging it’ is one of the endearing qualitites of the film, the killing fields becoming a field of dreams, gods willing. The tossed mixed salad of locations is a treat, too, from live Cambodian TV to dark dingy night clubs to remote production stages. The story of a country’s search for a future and a past intertwine with the story of a band’s search for its own voice and its audience. They’re planting new seeds where they found old roots in hopes that the tree will grow proud and strong and bear much fruit. They’ve got some help from the locals, kids and grannies too, and eventually another story emerges, our own universal love affair with pop music and the warm rich feelings that not only emerge upon listening, but can re-emerge to some extent with each successive listening. Thus the living library of pop music becomes a guided tour and an ever-expanding catalog of our own collective emotional lives and the complex psychologies that arise to explain and enhance it. While this may usually involve the typical boy/girl dynamic and the added extras that make everything so frustratingly triangular and inconclusive, still this is the best clue we have as to how our nervous systems actually operate and the basis for much subsequent philosophy. More importantly these same frustrations that threaten to tear us apart also bind us together as humans with common experience.

At least now you don’t have to learn Khmer language to listen to Dengue Fever in the original so much anymore, as they’ve added more songs in English to their latest album Venus on Earth. Still, if the number of plays is the final measure of an album’s worth to me, then Escape from Dragon House still remains the magnum opus. How they can create such hauntingly beautiful songs composed back-and-forth between English and Khmer is a mystery to me and no small feat I assure you. It’ll be interesting to see what they do on their next album. They’ve come a long way from their first album of Khmer-language covers. Me, I’m just looking for a lobotomist who can remove the title song from Escape from my own internal play list, not that I don’t like it, but just the opposite. I want to get on with my life. But on second thought, naaah… I like that feeling. Sleepwalking Through the Mekong is available now on DVD in all the usual places. Enjoy.