Paci­fic­tion – first-look review

When it was announced that the Span­ish film­mak­er Albert Ser­ra was set to pre­mière his new fea­ture, Paci­fic­tion, in the Cannes com­pe­ti­tion, the instant and obvi­ous reac­tion was, ​“Oh, he’s final­ly made ​‘one for them’.”

A long­time prowler of the mar­gins and side­bars, Serra’s slow, con­cept-dri­ven and his­tor­i­cal­ly-entrenched cin­e­ma is pro­grammed in such a way that it pro­vides a mea­sure of cau­tion to the unini­ti­at­ed fes­ti­val patron. His non-nar­ra­tive pre­vi­ous film, Lib­erté, for instance, ran at close to three hours and con­sist­ed of an 18^th cen­tu­ry wood­land-based orgy cap­tured almost in real time.

It’s a rare joy to report, then, that his accep­tance into the festival’s high­est ech­e­lon is not cov­er for a cin­e­mat­ic soft­en­ing exer­cise, as Paci­fic­tion is a 100 per­cent pure uncut Ser­ra – accept no sub­sti­tutes. It is chal­leng­ing and dream­like in its pre­sen­ta­tion, a grand tragedy chart­ing the down­fall of a man and, quite pos­si­bly, mankind in toto.

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 you in check.

Vet­er­an French actor Benoît Mag­imel dons a loose-fit­ting cream suit, Hawai­ian shirt open to the chest and a pair of blue-tint­ed dark glass­es 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. he 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 jumped-up 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 which fore­grounds the crush­ing exis­ten­tial weight of the sit­u­a­tion. Lush widescreen panora­mas of shore­lines, jun­gles and domes­tic encamp­ments are filmed so the sun glim­mers 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 in cer­tain sequences 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 that De Roller adopts a dif­fer­ent guise and a dif­fer­ent way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with every 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 that’s ren­dered as a trop­i­cal daydream.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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