Pacifiction is the kind of rare film whose thematic dialectic is conducted almost entirely on aesthetic grounds. While Albert Serra’s film plays out over a series of extended, studied dialogue scenes, this chatter is secondary and supplementary to the ideas being teased out in the Catalan filmmaker’s careful framings and soft-focus imagery. Intentionally self-deluded, its picturesque, bleeding-sunset horizons and tropical vistas are so saturated and idyllic they suggest a classical Hollywood soundstage’s conception of an Indo-Pacific locale. However, as we follow De Roller (Benoît Magimel), a French federal official permanently clad in an off white suit, saunter about Tahiti, we begin to recognize how the cluelessness and empty confidence of his behaviors are echoed in the deceptively gorgeous water-surrounded sights.
The film, which Serra co-wrote with Baptiste Pinteaux and directed, is doled out as a treatise on the spuriousness of pleasure, observing as French marines visiting Tahiti and the locals alike drown their boredom and consciences with booze and drugs at a club called Morton’s. Serra’s languid, hazy filmmaking style mirrors the intoxication expertly with mesmeric sequences of bacchanalia. In its sometimes dreamlike portrait of white people insidiously poisoning a southeast Asian country, there are parallels here with Chantal Akerman’s under-seen Almayer’s Folly. Unlike the latter film, Pacifiction is told entirely in chronological order (though it does descend into a dark night of the soul that feels steadily displaced from reality) rather than a series of overlapping, unannounced flashbacks. But both movies are striking in their visuals- and sensory properties-first approach to colonial occupation.
Another divergence from Akerman’s approach — at least to my memory — is that Serra’s movies are frequently very funny, in a quiet and dry sort of way. De Roller is seemingly a choreographer and director of an indigenous tribal dance and ritual, for which he encourages the participants to ramp up the violence, commissioning a cockfight to start up at their heels. The shot of him and a collaborator staring on at the demonstration with evaluative furrowed brows is bleakly yet amusingly provocative. As is a scene in which, straddling a jet ski, he joins a mass of boats that have convened on top of a cresting wave, attesting to its resultant “huge adrenaline rush.” The latter sequence is a bravura at-sea set piece, like an arthouse miniature of the final act of Avatar: The Way of Water.
Since he chooses to stage most of the film’s difficult-to-unpack attitudes about bodies occupying spaces and competing political and institutional regimes in visual terms, Serra only verbally tips his hand to the themes and the hypocrisies he’s trying to excavate very occasionally. For example, a somewhat revelatory, late-in-film, car-bound conversation and an earlier bit of dialogue where De Roller cops to “utilizing [his] privilege maybe too much.” This line is in reference to how the character comports himself at the club, but it clearly has broader implications. These sparing hints toward a thesis mostly don’t feel overly explanatory, as we need some tether to what Serra is trying to explore. There are also some mentions of the concept of home and who the island belongs to that cast the movie’s shifty, voyeuristic gaze in a new light. In Pacifiction, Tahiti is a place constantly being contested for ownership but whose enticing yet unattainable beauty refuses possession. The film itself similarly refuses easy classification and explication.
Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film
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