Pacifiction Review: Albert Serra’s Hypnotic Look at Contemporary Malaise

Albert Serra’s recent historical works, including Story of My Death and Liberté, have been fixated on power and decadence, so it’s only natural that the filmmaker would have found his way eventually to the modern world and its corrupt geopolitical landscape. Pacifiction trades the 17th-century France of Serra’s last two features for a Polynesian island buckling under rumors of malign influence from Russia, China, and the U.S.—intimations of nuclear meddling and financial malfeasance that feel very au courant.

Meanwhile, instead of the weary Sun King imagined in The Death of Louis XIV, Serra offers a figure of comparable impotence: Tahiti ambassador De Roller (Benoît Magimel), a government puppet presented as an object of both mockery and compassion. Roasting in the tropical sun among the darker-skinned locals in a crisp white suit and floral shirt, De Roller is immediately detectable in Serra’s spacious, relaxed compositions, and deadpan comedy is often mined from his gawky presence alone. His way with words is another source of farce, as most anyone who gives him the time of day can expect a smooth-talking introduction followed by a rambling monologue about the dignity of his position as an alleged peacekeeper and friend to all.

Between Pacifiction’s pleasant beachside setting and its cultural emphasis on leisure activities like boating and clubbing, viewers may be tempted to draw parallels to Donald Trump’s dog and pony shows in Florida. But De Roller, despite embodying the dubious eye of a white infiltrator when he praises the violent energy in a traditional theatrical dance performance, generally flaunts a more modest, democratic disposition than America’s former president.

Serra’s point, which becomes apparent over prolonged, almost surveillance-like attention to the man, is that De Roller is essentially useless. He’s a cog in the machine of forces far greater than himself, more necessary for relaying the image of a benevolent state than for enacting any actual policies on the ground—a function hinted at by the film’s portmanteau title.

Dashes of conflict emerge around the arrival of a troupe of marines led by an enigmatic admiral (Marc Susini) whose vaguely apocalyptic proclamations tip De Roller off to the possibility of nuclear testing re-emerging on the island for the first time in three decades. One local points out how the circumstances carry the faint ring of a James Bond plot, and while the man is right, De Roller is no Bond and Serra is no thriller director. Indeed, Pacifiction uses its thin narrative elements as a pretense to explore the texture of uncertainty, suspicion, and inaction. As De Roller conducts his daily rounds to the beach, the seaside homes, and the nightclub where the entire ensemble regularly convenes, he starts playing detective, scoping out traces of sinister activity and even recruiting a few bemused locals to help him.

For those familiar with Serra’s work, it’s hardly a spoiler to indicate that none of this leads to a big shootout or any similar dramatic fireworks. What we do get, at a staggering but never tedious three hours, is a carefully sustained orchestration of mood and tone, with Serra inducing hypnosis from the lethargic sway of palm trees, the distant reverberation of marimba music, and the auburn glow of the Tahiti sunset, which blankets the landscape for most of the movie like the realism-defying sun from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle.

The lethargy that pervades the post-colonialist setting of Pacifiction is no doubt inspired by Joseph Conrad, perhaps even Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of the writer’s work in Almayer’s Folly, but Serra’s particular examination of a Polynesian tourist is rooted less in the political specifics of the region than in a broader feeling of contemporary malaise. As doom and gloom mounts around his outpost and none of his usual methods of outreach yield any satisfying solutions, De Roller becomes an increasingly sympathetic figure, his growing recognition of his own impotence registering as an identifiable symptom of modern life.