The Polynesian island of Tahiti represents a tropical purgatory for the French colonists in Albert Serra’s apocalyptic political thriller.
All great filmmakers end up making their version of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, and this is Spanish eccentric Albert Serra’s breathtaking and languorous take on the material. A longtime prowler of the margins and festival sidebars, Serra’s slow, concept-driven and historically-entrenched cinema is build to provide a measure of caution to the uninitiated.
His non-narrative previous film, Liberté, for instance, ran at close to three hours and captured the fluid-based realties of an 18th century aristocratic woodland orgy, almost in real time. (The film rules btw!)
Even though his new film, Pacifiction, appears bigger and starrier from the outset, we’re thrilled to report that this is a 100 per cent pure uncut Serra – accept no substitutes. It is challenging and dreamlike, a grand tragedy charting the downfall of a man and, quite possibly, mankind. It’s a film that is connected very much to the geopolitical now, and the notion that however big or important we may feel we are inside a certain system, there’s always someone bigger, stronger, and possibly madder lurking in the shadows, waiting for their moment to put us in check.
Veteran French actor Benoît Magimel dons a loose-fitting cream suit, buttoned-down Hawaiian shirt and a pair of blue-tinted shades as French High Commissioner to the Republic of Tahiti De Roller. He is an operator of the utmost poise, slinking between the backstage area of a local nightclub where he delivers detailed feedback on cabaret performance rehearsals, to meetings in far-flung locales where he suppresses dissident behaviour, or makes sure the fix is in on his favoured mayoral candidate.
The arrival of a submarine sparks rumours that the French plan to reinstate nuclear testing in the relatively-stable region for the first time in 20 years, and try as he might, De Roller can’t seem to get the inside track on what’s actually going down. The entire film hangs on Magimel’s jittery and detailed performance, a mess of tics and pouts in which he exudes soft-spoken confidence and a benign personability while clearly masking the realisation that he’s almost reached the limit of his professional usefulness.
While this sounds on paper like boilerplate John le Carré or Graham Greene territory, Serra rolls out the story in such a way that foregrounds the crushing existential weight of the situation. Lush widescreen panoramas of shorelines, jungles and domestic encampments are filmed so the sun shimmers from them, making them appear as an ethereal paradise on Earth.
The skies are streaked with tangerine hues, a portent of the fiery apocalypse that sits just beyond the horizon. Serra’s experiments with duration and the way he paints with bodies in the frame add to an overall transition towards the surreal in the film’s second half. And the dry ironist of yore is still very visible, mainly in the way De Roller adopts a different guise and a different way of communicating with each person he encounters. Pacifiction is by far Serra’s most serious and sombre film to date, an epic of neutered power and human expendability – a death-knell for humanity rendered as a tropical daydream.
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Published 12 Apr 2023
What will mad Albert Serra come up with next, and how punishing will it be for audiences?
As close as we’re ever going to get to a straight thriller from this outlandish maverick.
One to see on the biggest screen possible.
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Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
