captured by cambodia

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Apr 18, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

What comes to mind when you think of Cambodia?

Street cafes where schlubby expatriates are fawned upon by teeny Asian prostitutes? Army types in Toyota Land Cruisers and boys on mopeds toting AK-47s? Limbless beggars and shattered streets?

The correct answer would be all of the above. And Portland-based movie director Marlin Darrah knows it. His debut feature, “Monsoon Wife,” tells an engaging human story that remains sympathetic to the Cambodian people while hitting all the big targets.

Darrah, who usually makes travel documentaries and has been to 130 countries, is your typical been-there, done-that world citizen. But the little country between Thailand and Vietnam changed his life.

“I went to Cambodia in 2000 thinking about making a documentary, and soon realized it had to be a feature,” the 47-year-old says over tea at the Thurman Cafe. “Phnom Penh is a renegade city, full of bullet holes. There are a few gems of French colonial architecture, and the temples, monks in saffron robes, the brothels, the whole sacred and profane thing. É ”

So he wrote the story of Thomas McIntyre, an American man in Cambodia on the rebound. McIntyre has fallen in with a sleazy expat procuring country girls for “karaoke” bars in the capital, Phnom Penh. He then mends his ways, finds a local girlfriend, or “monsoon wife,” and starts selling his paintings to tourists.

Out of the blue, however, comes Cliff, an old fraternity brother. High on dot-com stock money, drunkenly toting his camcorder and obsessively checking his e-mail, Cliff is the updated ugly American abroad. He hires a reluctant Thomas for $5,000 to be his guide to the underbelly of city life for a week, including the notorious brothels with their underage girls. Cliff has brought his new wife with him, who happens to be Thomas’ ex, setting up a powerful love-hate quadrangle.

Darrah calls his first feature a “microindependent” because it had a budget of just $100,000, and almost everyone worked for “points,” or a percentage of any profits.

“We would have had to pay that again in shooting permits, so we went guerrilla,” the Eugene native says with a smile.

A wild corner of the world

Cambodia has only been on the tourist map for two or three years, according to Darrah, and it’s still the Wild West of Southeast Asia. You can rent a three-bedroom apartment in central Phnom Penh with a maid for $300 a month. Many of his cast and crew of 20 had never been outside the United States. Suddenly they were in a country where sex costs $2, a pound of pot $20, a machine gun $200.

Rob Stockton, another Eugene native, and lead actor McGeorge Robinson, from Prineville, are both now trying to make it in Los Angeles. Cambodia was their first trip abroad.

“I had culture shock on the very first day,” says Stockton, who brilliantly plays the obnoxious Cliff. “But I kept telling myself not to compare it to the U.S. and accept it on its own terms.”

Much of the filming was done in the street, without paid extras. “One time I saw this group of Khmers running at us with AK-47s, and I just froze. Luckily they ran right past us,” Stockton says.

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