‘White Building’ Review: Coming of Age in Cambodia

The title of Kavich Neang’s richly noticed function, “White Building,” is, to begin with, an exaggeration: The dilapidated house bloc it describes is so chipped and black with soot that it’s barely white; certainly, it’s so falling aside that it’s barely a constructing.

But for Samnang (Piseth Chhun), the younger protagonist of this delicate and largely autobiographical coming-of-age portrayal, it’s house, because the real-life White Building it’s based mostly on was for Neang.

Located in central Phnom Penh, the constructing is an apt image of the customarily excruciating adjustments Cambodia has endured over the past 60 years. It was constructed within the Nineteen Sixties to deal with civil servants, then emptied throughout the Khmer Rouge’s compelled relocations of the Nineteen Seventies. In the ’80s, it grew to become house to working class folks like Samnang’s diabetic father (Sithan Hout), who, like Neang’s, is a sculptor. Now its inhabitants are being pushed to take a awful deal so it may be demolished for brand spanking new improvement, in a metropolis they’ll now not afford.

Unlike his dad and mom, Samnang has no reminiscences of the Khmer Rouge. He and his buddies grew up with cellphones and hip-hop, and so they dream of turning into a well-known dance troupe. They need what different boys of their technology need: girlfriends, Nikes, an opportunity to show themselves.

Neang excels at that Tarkovskian trick of rendering the small particulars of decay — a cracked tile, a leaking ceiling — with such lived-in precision that they really feel one way or the other particular and surreal directly; just like the title, photographs pressure their very own semantic boundaries. The movie’s free plotting and secondary character improvement can depart a number of too many hanging threads, however its sense of place is so palpable you possibly can nearly odor the smoky metropolis markets, the sweat, the hormones.

White Building
Not rated. In Khmer, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour half-hour. In theaters.