Pacifiction (Albert Serra, 2022) (Patreon)

In many respects a radical shift for Albert Serra, Pacifiction is about history and delusion, the carving out of an imaginary place out of time and being brought up short when you discover, much too late, that time has been carrying you along without your awareness. Depicted in wide establishing shots that resemble the exoticism of Gauguin, the Tahiti of Pacifiction is both a real place (a French Polynesian protectorate) and a fantasy that has outlasted its utility. These contradictions are embodied in the French High Commissioner, a man named De Roller (Benoît Magimel).

A roving plenipotentiary in dark shades, with a light jacket over a tropical shirt, De Roller behaves like a Parrothead Rick Blaine, micro-managing the Paradise nightclub, cutting side deals with the locals, and enjoying the federal power invested in him by a country that has long sense stopped caring. Serra shows him to be a bossman unafraid and even giddily anxious to get his hands dirty with local schemes and minor league power grabs. His constant refrain is, "let me know if I can help you." With his dark-corner meetings and binoculars trained on the shoreline, De Roller is essentially a small-time mayor playing at spycraft.

Of course this cannot last. Near the start of Pacifiction, De Roller learns that there are rumors going around that France plans to resume nuclear testing on the isle of Tahiti after a thirty-year moratorium. He laughs it off, assuring people that he'll never let that happen, and he must check with his operatives both up and down the chain. But when military personnel, including a mysterious French admiral (Marc Susini), start milling around the island, De Roller becomes increasingly worried. His efforts to flex muscle show him to be badly out of shape, politically speaking.

Perhaps more significantly, a group of local activists, led by a man named Mahati (Mahati Pambrun) and financed by a shady financier known as Mr. Mike (Mike Landscape), call a meeting with De Roller to let him know that they will be undertaking a vague public action that will most likely result in violence. Their intent is to simply inform De Roller of what his role should be, but he vainly persists in his conviction that nothing happens in Tahiti without his say-so. The very picture of benevolent paternalism, De Roller cannot conceive of a Tahiti that is run by Tahitians, or at least those he did not himself put in place.

One of the defining traits of Serra's cinema has been his interest in private enclaves, both in the physical sense -- isolated corners of existence hidden away from the rest of the world -- and in terms of the development of a trusted coterie of co-conspirators. Drawing lessons from what seem to be to be his two major influences, Fassbinder and Warhol, Serra has tended to work with the same people repeatedly, putting them in obscure, claustrophobic situations, in order to generate the friction of clashing personal styles. His 2015 multi-screen epic Singularity is the best example of this, but most of his features evince this preference, particularly Liberté and Birdsong.

Pacifiction is a bit like The Death of Louis XIV in that Serra has opened his universe to include a "movie star." Where Jean-Pierre Léaud was kind of a symbol in Louis, Magimel carries Pacifiction on his shoulders most of the time. Serra regulars like Susini, Lluís Serrat, and Montse Triola appear alongside first-time Polynesian actors, and as with many of Serra's previous films, much of the action happens in small spaces, like the darkened corner of a bar or an underlit meeting room. This produces an odd effect, since these elements of Serra's aesthetic, which had sort of been free-floating signifiers, are now connected to the plot. What had been a wholesale rejection of the outside world now becomes a zone of subterfuge.

For those who haven't ever been completely convinced by Serra, this opening-up feels like evolution, even maturation. (Serra often comports himself as the upstart punk, but this attitude is belied by his mastery of craft.) I am not entirely convinced that this move was necessary, but that could just be me bristling at having to share Serra with the broader film universe. I will need to spend more time with Pacifiction to really be certain of my reaction to it. It makes a perverse sort of sense that this most anti-psychological of filmmakers would produce an anti-Method riff on Apocalypse Now, depicting a social collapse so muted that even De Roller himself cannot perceive it. 

The result combines Serra's usual focus on mood and atmosphere with a more pointed set of social questions. But is this what Serra ought to be doing? I'm honestly not sure.