Direction: Albert Serra
Country: France / Spain / other
This demanding but engrossing political drama-mystery directed by Catalonian director Albert Serra is set in the exotic island of Tahiti in French Polynesia, where big blue waves are surfed with intensity, and the red and orange tones of the sunset sky are gloriously captured by cinematographer Artur Tort. The film lives from rumors, conspiracy theories, and paranoia, being dramatized with hints of queer-ish fantasy, intrigue, and strangeness.
Benoit Magimel is terrific as Mr. de Roller, a popular High Commissioner of State (a mix of civil servant and politician) who considers himself a man of action. This tormented French politician, caught between paradise and fear, lives obsessed with control and power, seeing ‘dangers’ all around him while walking in circles. He plays on both sides of the fence and his major worries consist of a casino to be build soon against people’s will; a little boat often seen with foreign men and local girls that is assumed to be in contact with an invisible spy submarine; a Portuguese diplomat (Alexandre Melo) who should be plotting against him with the help of a depraved admiral (Marc Susini) in secret mission; and a local organized movement against nuclear testings that is acting without his consent. There are few people he relies on, one of them being Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau), a transgender hotel receptionist whose assignment is to extract more info from those he suspects of conspiracy.
Serra has a very personal cinematic touch that reached a peak with the historical drama The Death of Louis XIV (2016). In the contemporary Pacifiction (a portmanteau of Pacific and fiction), his minimalist stance is as powerfully suggestive as the atmospherics that, lean or lush, permeate the film and can numb you into an abstruse, dark dream. This is a different kind of thriller that, capturing the sad constancy of political restlessness in a particular circuited context, feels like a delirious mania, sometimes annoying in its compulsory idée fixe.
