Joshua Reviews Albert Serra’s Pacifiction [Theatrical Review]

With 2022 well in the rearview mirror, and award season coming to a close, more and more of 2022’s most talked about independent and foreign-language films are finally leaving the festival circuit and actually hitting theaters domestically. One of those films, with its recent “Film Of The Year” status as given by the venerable Cahiers du Cinema, is the latest from the polarizing Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra and more than lives up to the hype and expectations.

Set in Tahiti, Pacifiction is Serra’s latest film, and stars Benoit Magimel as De Roller, the High Commissioner for French Polynesia, a territory that’s still overseen by French leadership. Over the film’s rather robust 164-minute runtime, viewers watch as De Roller breaks bread with activists, triess to get a casino greenlit and even takes part, albeit as a spectator, in a surf contest (in what may be one of Serra’s most ambitious and thrilling scenes to date). In arguably the film’s biggest narrative throughline, De Roller welcomes and then begins to follow an admiral, who is apparently on shore to get approved the resuming of nuclear testing just offshore.

While the film never gives way to a full-on detective story, Serra instead embraces the paranoia of the situation, turning Pacifiction into something more closely resembling a paradise-set ‘70s conspiracy picture. Shot simultaneously on three separate cameras, the director shot over 500 hours of footage in total, ultimately giving the film a looser, and in turn increasingly sinister, energy. There’s a looseness to the performances as well, as it’s been reported that the screenplay and performances were revised in the moment, on the fly, through an earpiece that Magimel would receive direction from. It’s a decidedly stark change of pace for a director whose meticulousness has made him one of the great formalist filmmakers.

However, this is still very much a Serra film, through and through. Darkly comic, Pacifiction is a harrowing rumination on colonialism that takes its on the fly energy and ultimately evolves into some sort of journey into an unknown ring of hell where the idea that a government would harm its own people to deter its enemies is front and center. While the film gives glances towards the idea that the rumors De Roller has heard are true, we’re left unsure if they’ll come to fruition, but in the end isn’t the idea that it’s even on the table already a deal with the Devil? And let’s not even begin to discuss the perversion that is the tourism racket, an economic structure that forces colonialized lands to hope for the ongoing consumption of resources by outsiders to keep their own economy afloat.

All of these ideas are at the front and center of Serra’s new film, which itself is one of the director’s most ambitious works formally. Not only one of his longer theatrical works (itself pointing towards this film’s closer resemblance to his longer-form gallery works), the film sees Serra flex more of his directorial muscle here, increasingly becoming more and more surreal until the final moments where the film turns into something truly otherworldly. Artur Tort’s camerawork and photography here are crisp and evocative, especially when he and Serra lean into the more impressionistic moments, like a hedonistic dance sequence near the film’s conclusion.

Performances here are also quite moving. Magimel is another of Serra’s captivating leading men, albeit a different breed than his recent performers like Helmut Berger (Liberte) and Jean-Pierre Leaud (The Death of Louis XIV). Encased in a uniform fit for a stay in paradise, Magimel’s crisp white suit points towards a man always ready to make a deal, and that’s encompassed brilliantly by Magimel’s dry, politician-like performance. He’s closest to Shannah (played by Pahoa Mahagafanau), a transgender dancer, yet still can’t shake free of his need to manipulate each and every situation to best fit his needs and his needs only. Mahagafanau’s performance, conversely, is beautiful and quietly warm, giving the film some much-needed heart and humanity.

While Serra’s latest will not make new fans out of his previous detractors, it does show a director at the very height of his powers. A thoughtful, often dream-like character study, Pacifiction is a shattering work of long-form cinema (you could call it “slow” if we want to be very base about it), where mood or “vibe” is most of the battle. While viewers are lulled into a story about a politician who fears he may be in over his head, the film ultimately gives way to a shattering story about the horrors of colonialism. Yet another essential piece of filmmaking from arguably the most interesting filmmaker alive today.