The Divided Heart - Movie Premier

Sunday the 11th
Movie Premier and Heng’s Screen Debut
The day started very early, about 06:30. For some reason the invite-only grand opening was taking place at 08:30 on a Sunday morning. Of course, the fact that I had been out the night before handing out free VIP invitations to the opening to various friends of mine in various bars did not help the fact that my head felt like there was Khmer wedding marquee being erected within it.

Arriving around 8 we hung around outside the cinema waiting for the red ribbon cutting ceremony for nearly an hour – yes, we were on Khmer time.

All the while the TV cameras were rolling and the young freshie girl presenter from TVK was interviewing people in the crowd, as well as the actors and actresses, who were just hanging around in the crowd with us. Somewhat more relaxed than their Hollywood counterparts would be at an LA opening of their new movie.

Eventually we had the ribbon cutting and we all filtered into the cinema, as we started to enter the auditorium we were handed fruit and water by the ushers.

Thankfully inside was well air-conditioned and a blessed relief from the sun that we had been standing in for so long.

As the last few people were taking their seats an announcer gets up on stage and introduces:

The stuntmen and martial arts crew; who after taking a bow launch into a quick enactment of a fight. After this the actresses get up on stage and take a bow and a round of applause. Then the director, producers, technical crew and assorted odds and ends get up to take theirs.

Finally with curtain up around 09:30 we were besieged with adverts for beer, phones and makeup taking us up to about 10:00 for the grand premier of…

The Divided Heart
A teenage love story and rights of passage movie set mostly in Phnom Penh. It tells the story of a beautiful girl who goes off to school and has two boys fall in love with her. One a nice guy from a rich urban family, the other an equally nice, but poor, kid from the provinces with his oddball sidekick acting as a scaramouch. Neither of them is really the villain of the piece, that role falls to the rich kids highly jealous, psycho, ex-girlfriend; who between causing a scene in a burger bar, trying to bribe Miss Beautiful to leave town and arranging for her to be kidnapped (along with telling the kidnappers to rape her) fulfils the obligatory ‘baddie’ position quite enough for a Sunday morning family movie.

Although the movie is all in Khmer, I could easily manage to follow it with my modest language skills and the fact that such a narrative is almost universal in storytelling around the world gives the viewer a sense of ease with the plot.

At this point I would like to give a special thanks to my western, non-Khmer speaking friends who turned up, slight warily, to support us all, they also found it reasonably easy to follow and enjoyed the morning greatly.

One of the refreshing things about this Khmer movie was the fact that it was just a simple love story, or love triangle, set against life in modern Phnom Penh, with pretty much only the obstacles that you face in everyday life. The fact that it did not contain; men with snakes for hair, or giant super snakes, or bouncing zombie vampire monsters with white squares of paper on their foreheads was also very much a bonus for us non Khmers and does, I feel, give a sense of hope that the industry here is not just going to keep churning out schlock horror gore laden B movies forever.

I will not give away too much of the ending, but it will suffice to say that, as one would suspect, all turns out well in the end, the guys survive, the girl escapes with her honour and virtue intact and the wicked get ‘a right royal arse kicking’, to quote a friend of mine. Having watched them film various scenes from the movie over the last six months and seeing the finished project, I would have to say that the stuntmen and martial arts crew certainly earned their money in the final showdown, especially as I know that they used no protective clothing and were working for peanuts, when they filmed that ‘right royal arse kicking’.