Pacifiction Review | Artful Island Paranoia

Although it’s as methodically paced and experimental as anything attempted by him before, Pacifiction, the atypical, smouldering espionage drama from esteemed filmmaker Albert Serra, is also a marked departure. Pivoting away from period pieces and free association to a great degree, the still largely improvisational Pacifiction relies on a clockwork narrative precision to go alongside Serra’s natural tendency towards visually poetic philosophizing. Even by the unique standards Serra (Story of My Death, The Death of Louis XIV) has established for himself thus far as a boundary pushing auteur, Pacifiction will catch many familiar with his past works off guard. It’s a contemporary work rooted in an often uncelebrated written tradition treated with the grace, delicacy, scope, and intelligence of a Greek tragedy. It’s a film many of the director’s closest admirers might not have thought he would have in him, and yet, it’s unmistakably a picture by Serra, boasting similar amounts of confounding, beguiling playfulness and a type of confidence few working filmmakers possess today.

In French Polynesia, the always snappily attired De Roller (Benoît Magimel) is the person to talk to if anything needs to get done or a problem needs to go away with quiet discretion. De Roller is the High Commissioner, the highest ranking public official for the French government living in the islands. He dresses and acts like he’s somehow trying to win a contest impersonating Eric Roberts and Peter Fonda at the same time (perpetually favouring the same outdated combination of beach friendly sports coat and sunglasses), and yet, De Roller is respected by a wide swath of the populace that he routinely liaises with, from nightclub dancers and hotel personnel making wages around the poverty line to multimillionaires with palatial estates. But De Roller’s idyllic and easy time at the top – which is drawing to a close – is about to be rocked by a threat he supposedly never saw coming.

There are rumblings – particularly among the indigenous community, which are ready to protest and fight – that the French have positioned submarines just off shore. The only reason to do so would be to resurrect France’s nuclear testing program in the region, which has left scars and wounds in the past that still haven’t healed. Wanting to get answers and re-build bridges before they crumble for good, De Roller tries to get out ahead of everything, but slowly starts to realize that his largely ceremonial position of power has left him on a “need to know” basis with the military that has rolled into town, and there’s plenty that those in power don’t want him to know.

Clocking in at just a shade under three hours, Pacifiction spends most of its first third getting to know the island’s politics and subtly dropping in hints that something suspicious is going on: a mysterious admiral (Marc Susini) won’t specify why he has an entire battalion of sailors with him, a Portuguese traveller (Alexandre Melo) is unusually upset and cagey about the fact that his passport and documents have gone missing from his hotel room, a soon-to-be-opened casino suddenly highlights religious fuelled racism on the islands. De Roller and the viewer alike have to wade through the morass and determine if all of these seemingly important threads are links or subtle smokescreens hiding larger truths. Serra tells the film almost exclusively from De Roller’s narrow, privileged, but refreshingly unbiased viewpoint, so the viewer knows only a sliver more than the main character along the journey. That sliver means the viewer will know that De Roller is a patsy in the typical spy movie tradition; one who won’t realize he’s being had until it’s almost too late to turn back. Even without the obvious costuming of the character and Magimel’s finely tuned performance as the man caught in the middle of a political storm, the viewer understands that at a certain point De Roller’s actual influence and importance will turn out to be minimal in the eyes of the very state that appointed him.

And therein lies the subtle thrills and resounding philosophical impact of Pacifiction (a title that mashes up Pacific and Fiction, but is also a clever misspelling of the word pacification, which is precisely what all the powers that be are attempting to achieve in their own sometimes perverse ways). In Serra’s take on a traditional genre film, diplomacy is a flirtation; bar chatter that’s babbling, flattering, combative, and ultimately consequential if the bait is taken or empty if the passes are rebuked. The unfurling, multicultural tapestry of island life that’s depicted in Pacifiction comes from the viewpoint of a colonizer slowly realizing that he has lost the trust and standing given to him by those responsible for his power in the first place; a man of once great importance fighting not only for those he has previously advocated for, but also railing against his impending status as a lame duck.

After about an hour, everything starts slowly clicking into place, with Serra gradually and subtly ratcheting up the paranoia and intrigue to a point where Pacifiction becomes one of the writer-director’s most entertaining efforts. It’s as visually stunning as one might expect from Serra, but Artur Tort’s cinematography is much more eye catching when out in natural environments, with interiors coming across as somewhat flat until almost the very end of the film. The editing is patient, yet clever, making it harder for the viewer to guess ahead of time what moments hold the greatest significance to the whole of the plot, but all of which shine a light on the world these characters co-exist within. Technically, Pacifiction comes together like a concerto heralding the arrival of a coming storm, building to a memorably eerie sequence set in the early hours of the morning on a soccer pitch.

Pacifiction wont be to everyone’s taste, and even those who appreciate Serra’s more obtuse efforts might find this one to be a bit of a challenge out of the gate. It’s an odd film that alternates between embracing storytelling conventions and pushing back against them. It’s a chatty film that in some of its lesser moments plays like the French Planation scenes from Apocalypse Now Redux writ large, but even in those lengthy, static spaces, Serra provides the viewer with plenty to wrap their head around. It’s a film that confidently invests in the viewer’s ability to pay attention and keep up as they drown in the same quicksand as the characters. The end result is a powerful one: a treatise about the ways evil can disguise itself in the most innocuous ways, and how the universe might be too late to turn back from the brink of chaos.

Pacifiction opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, The Cinematheque in Vancouver, and Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon on Friday, February 24, 2023. It opens at Metro Cinema in Edmonton on Saturday, February 25, and at Sudbury Indie Cinema in Sudbury, ON on Thursday, March 16.

Pacifiction (Trailer with English Subtitles) from filmswelike on Vimeo.