Pacifiction

Cinema is light and the mystifying mood created in Albert Serra’s entrancing Pacifiction (a highlight in the Main Slate of the 60th New York Film Festival), shot by the brilliant César and Lumières-winning cinematographer Artur Tort (Liberté; Roi Soleil; Cuba Libre; Els Tres Porquets) with Serra’s system of using three cameras (he is also the editor), transports us into a land that is very real and somehow not of this earth, where the sky is perpetually on fire.

The mysterious De Roller played by César winner Benoît Magimel (he also won for Emmanuelle Bercot’s Peaceful in 2022 and Standing Tall in 2016) is a High Commissioner stationed on Tahiti in French Polynesia, “representing the State,” as he likes to say. A submarine has been spotted and more and more marines seem to come ashore to visit the local establishments. First among them is the Paradise, a club in the hands of Morton (Sergi López - who carries some of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth with him in this role).

There is the Admiral (Marc Susini, first valet to the King in Serra’s previous work) who likes to dance with his men and others he meets and for whom drugs are a reminder of being at sea. Morton, who preferably clothes himself in golden shirts and chintzy suits in chocolate brown (costumes by Praxedes de Vilallonga), is probably not who you imagine to preside over paradise. The dawn cannot make up its mind whether it wants to be pink and orange and settles for both.

On the islands, shown almost painfully beautiful and otherworldly, sparkling in saturated colors that make you swoon, mysterious people come and go and interact with the locals. There are rumors that a new round of nuclear tests is about to happen. We are mostly tied to De Roller, who is a great mystery himself, and are constantly challenged to figure out whom we encounter. A Portuguese man (Alexandre Melo) in an elegant lavender shirt, light blue trousers, and a shell necklace complains at the hotel that his passport was stolen. Receptionist Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau whose poise steals many scenes) does her best to calm him down and get a chance to possibly work for De Roller.

Why do these men pour alcohol down the throat of the passed out Portuguese guest as though he were Cary Grant in North By Northwest? Like a folktale transforming during the narration because the storyteller had a sudden change of mind, the disturbing goings-on resemble real life, in fact are more real than most quotidian lives allow.

A casino is to be opened on Bastille Day, there is some conflict with religious groups, the ruin of a hotel which was built on sacred ground has possibly found a new rich investor. A dance in the style of an abstract cockfight is being rehearsed and a famous French author called Romane Attia (Cécile Guilbert) arrives for a visit.

De Roller is everywhere and nowhere, he rolls around the island in his chauffeured white Mercedes and we, his hypnotized hostages with him. From the very first tracking shot of the light and the mountains and the shipping containers in the harbour a spell of the new is cast. You have not been here with these people the film seems to say and beckons us to succumb. The languid mood contrasts with the most dangerous topics. Like a sleepy, spellbound, very uninformed detective assistant we stumble along with the protagonist into a fascinating world.

The man in the white linen suits, worn with slightly garish shirts and tinted sunglasses at any time of day or night, can be a figure of authority and a surprised child, on the side of good and the ultimate enabler, a clown, a sage, a trickster-deity who doesn’t know he is one, and a pompous colonialist all at once.

This is not a binary world anymore, if it ever was and Serra masterfully erases boundaries. In The Death of Louis XIV, he put us, the audience, in the position of personified Death, visiting the King played by the incomparable Jean-Pierre Léaud. Here again in Pacifiction, Serra chose a former child star (Magimel) for the central role, as though some of our knowledge from movies of what the boy looked and sounded like is part of the enchantment that is allowed to resurface anew.

Life, nature, the most turquoise ocean and the rosiest sunsets surround our cypher. Without so many words and no didactic bone in its movie body, life seems to say: Really? You want to destroy me? For what? The film is of such stupendous beauty because, and not despite the fact that, we cannot really understand what is going on. During the 54th New York Film Festival, Serra briefly mentioned Vincente Minnelli’s Brigadoon as an aside, a reference that makes perfect, absurd sense. Magimel’s De Roller has some of the aura of the Van Johnson character.

Gatsby’s green light, transposed onto a motorboat starts and ends the adventure. Joan Didion’s writing may come to mind with its exquisite imagery and composition and its opaque, yet emotionally precise creation of meaning. “Grandpa, what did you do to defend our ocean?” one of the Indigenous inhabitants puts on the table during an awkward lunch with De Roller. We, the spectators, are invited, sometimes forced, to position ourselves because no one takes us by the hand in a Serra film. And then we realize all the manipulation and complacency in other movies.

On the waves it can be difficult to distinguish refugees from a regatta. A young indigenous leader named Matahi (Matahi Pambrun) says to the Commissioner: “Vanity doesn’t drive us the way it drives you people.” Walking out onto a sports field alone at night in the rain De Roller may suddenly resemble Prospero from The Tempest. “They are my prey” he says and knows that during this ongoing party with the devil controlling anything is an illusion. The Admiral gets the last word and with lightness and surprise the film sends us out into the world, slightly changed, slightly richer as human beings, which is a rare thing these days.

The free-floating abstract power, may it be God or political international conspiracy, increases De Roller’s paranoia. Who steers the meaning? We don’t. And while the characters ride on jet skis, smile mysterious smiles, have drinks with flowers in them, or practice dance moves, it becomes clearer and clearer that we are on a vessel out of control.