Beyond America

សង្ខេបរឿង

Under an Eastern European totalitarian regime, a prominent dissident writer survives repression by resuming a submissive sexual relationship with her former lover. After their split-up years ago, he had joined the Secret Police in order just to take her back and provide the protection she needed. Struggling to preserve her humanity, she falls in love with a young platonic dreamer, a kind of rebel without cause, whom she initiate in literature and reinvents as a character capable to meet her own desires of freedom. BEYOND AMERICA is a love story and an action drama altogether, with archetypes of an aggressive, totalitarian society. The story fallows the pattern of a modern fairy tale based upon the classic myth of Pygmalion and Galathea with reversed roles. The year is 1957. In her last fairy tales book BEYOND AMERICA, the hauntingly beautiful dissident writer MILENA tells the story of a sailor who committed suicide, after he had been incriminated with intention of fleeing to America and was to be put in jail. The subversive volume is confiscated from bookstores by the Secret Police. Vicious colonel MARCUS charges Milena with trying to corrupt the readers' mind to commit suicide in order to escape the nightmare of the dictatorship. As a punishment, she is deprived of her writer status and ordered to work at a remote re-education camp. She either accepts to be a construction worker (a mason), or she is to be imprisoned for parasitism. To avoid the camp's misery and humiliation, Milena tries to get help from IAN, her former lover. Ian is a French language teacher and a school principal. She used to know him as a tough guy, crazy enough to hire her. But she doesn't know that after her leaving him two years ago, Ian has got some mysterious connections to Bureau nr. 1 of the regime (The Supreme Leader). On this basis, Ian defies the Secret Police's orders, and hires Milena "to reeducate" her as a literature teacher. In exchange, they resume their intimate relationship. Encouraged by her actors-friends, amidst whom the peculiar EDGAR stands out, Milena begins to clandestinely translate her book into English. Edgar promises her to smuggle it out to AUGUSTIN, the leader of the Romanian Exile in Paris. While teaching her students poems like "Have no hope, and have no fear", Milena has an eye for MANU - nicknamed Castle builder -, a young rebellious mason working at the Congress Center construction site neighboring the school. Here there is STAN, an womanizer supervisor, who is after Milena too. Manu is a fervent admirer of her books. His rough, genuine attitude catches Milena's interest. Although he obviously doesn't belong to Milena's milieu, he is in hopeless love with her; so he splits up with MARIA, his current girlfriend, and tries to capture Milena's attention by attempting a fake suicide, mirroring the suicide of the sailor in her book. As a consequence, Milena is arrested and charged with instigation to political sabotage, since the Congress Center construction site was being an important political site of the regime. In the Secret Police interrogation cell, colonel Marcus tries to force her to sign a paper stating that the sailor killed himself not because he couldn't flee to America, but because his girlfriend had been previously raped by other sailors - which Milena refuses. Knowing that a writer usually depicts his or her own secret desire in books, Marcus is wondering whether she wouldn't enjoy the same treatment in real life, so he attempts to rape her and take compromising pictures. She is saved at the very last moment by Ian's phone call. Ian wanted not only to save her, but to get rid of his dangerous younger rival too. So he has talked Manu into turning himself in and playing a madman, as this would exonerate her from any responsibility. Anxious to save Milena, Manu has agreed. Marcus suspects this set-up, but threatened by Ian's high unexplainable connections, release Milena and places Manu in an insane asylum. Impressed with Manu's ordeal, as she begins to fall for him, Milena figures out a way to have him released. She sends an anonymous report, on behalf of "angry workers", to the Supreme Leader, asking for those who hired a madman to be punished (because they had committed the true political sabotage) and threatening to call a strike if not satisfied. Out of the blue, Marcus is ordered to release Manu and declare him sane, since the regime would rather claim there is no madman worker than to punish its own Secret Police servants. Now Marcus hates Ian's gods, and decides to corner him in any way. He places him under permanent surveillance. After her new rescue by Ian, Milena has to surrender again to his protector's sexual fantasies. Tortured by an unknown feeling of culpability, Ian has meanwhile developed an alcohol problem. Unexpectedly released from asylum, Manu pops in and witnesses her sexual submission to Ian, strangely carried on a background screen displaying the Arch of Triumph image in Paris. He is devastated because he never had suspected Milena's intimate relationship with Ian. On top of this, he is now accused by his co-workers of being an informant, otherwise in their view he could not had been released. Devastated, Manu has a nervous breakdown and hurls himself into a freshly made wall, nearly killing himself, thus comitting a true political sabotage. More dead than alive, rejected by hospitals because of his so-called suicidal behavior, Manu is taken by his co-workers to Milena's home. Surrounded by books, Manu is immobilized in bed. She nurses him back to health in a cozy environment that seems this time to be their own only. The young construction worker proves to be not exactly a construction worker, since he had also been assigned at the construction site as a punishment for having written dishes recipes instead of praising the regime in a political-essay test in college. In order to get Milena out of this nightmare for good, and split her up with Manu once forever, Ian offers her a passport to flee the country to Paris, normally an impossible act under the dictatorship. As she is now in love with Manu, she refuses and splits up with Ian, enraging him out of jealousy. She continues to translate her book, to nurse Manu and initiate him in literature issues, forcing him with romantic gestures to read books. Answering his repetitive question (why did the sailor kill himself?), she encourages him to find out the answers to all riddles in the book only. She teaches him that all themes have already been