PACIFICTION (Albert Serra 2022)

ALBERT SERRA: PACIFICTION (2022)

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MAGIMEL CHAUFFEURED ON JET SKI IN PACIICTION

Benoît Magimel triumphs winging it as a slimy French colonial bigwig

Benoît Magimel played the corrupt, manipulative son of gangsterish political boss Gérard Depardieu in the intricately plotted 2016-1018 French TV series "Marseille." Now he is Catalan auteur Albert Serra's Tahiti would be high roller High Commissioner De Roller in the drolly named Pacifiction, a slow-burning drama with almost no conventional plotline at all, that pacifies us and intrigues us instead with its deeply unnerving, vaguely surreal mood-picture of colonial wickedness, what Bradshaw called "its stealthy evocation of pure evil." It's beautiful, and Magimel's improvisations that ooze with slimy charm and weave double-breasted linen façades of invisibility and fake good will never disappoint. If the film works for you, and it worked for me and for many others, you will be on the edge of your seat at well over two hours scrutinizing the beautiful dark images of the Tahitian night in search of a climax that never quite comes but whose premonitions will haunt you with their teasing lack of resolution.

Serra's previous films have involved historical figures "hanging out," Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, then Casanova meeting Dracula (2013), or just slowly dying in the case of Louis XIV embodied by Jean-Pierre Léaud (2016). His last film (2020), which I haven't seen, and was less well received, consists of "bucholic debauchery" of pre-revolutionary French aristocrats. Pacifiction, the most complex and satisfying of Serra's films that I've seen, is set in the present and refers hauntingly to the nineties when France - not exactly on Tahiti, but on many outlying islands - From 1966 to 1974 blew up 41 nuclear weapons in above-ground tests in French Polynesia, grossly underestimating the fallout and human toll of cancer and deformed offspring for generations to come. Now there is a rumor going around that a return to nuclear testing on the islands is being planned.

In Pacifiction High Commissioner De Roller appears in many settings. Mostly he charms or wings it as a collaborator. Notably he must also encounter Matahi (Matahi Pambrun), a young local firebrand who warns him about coming demonstrations against nuclear testing. It's not a friendly meeting, but even this time De Roller comes up close and talks in a low voice, making it feel like he and Matahi are collaborators. Elsewhere he denies that any such thing is afoot; assures that he will do everything he can to make sure it doesn't happen; or he says he is an underling and knows nothing; or, to cohorts, in confidence, says he doesn't care. Toward film's end shut in his white Mercedes with his silent Sancho Panza, Lois (Lluís Serrat, who played that role literally for Serra in 2006), he declares that it's going to be more than testing, it's going to destroy everything, and they're going to be long gone and don't give a damn.

A trouble is that as evidenced by Lois, except for an elegant, tall, trans person called Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) who wants to become De Roller's assistant and does so, and that quickly passed over moment of challenge from Matahi Pambrun, there's rarely anybody on the highly colored 4K screen sipping fruity drinks or riding chauffeured jet skis as interesting as Magimel. But Magimel as De Roller is a cipher too, just a fascinating one.

Perhaps it's how undefined the figures are that makes them haunting, part of the mystery this film weaves. There's a Portuguese, Ferreira (Alexandre Melo), turned up hung over and without a passport. Is he an enemy or a victim? There's the often-referred to "Admiral" (Marc Susini), seen drunkenly dancing at the sleazy nightclub De Roller drops in on, whose proprietor Morton appears in a cameo by Sergi Lopez. There's Mike (Mike Landscape), an American, seen with Fereira, clearly not friendly towards De Roller. These and others are never defined and remain troubling ciphers.

As Guy Lodge writes in his Variety review, with De Roller, "whether he’s appeasing local community leaders to pave the way for a new luxury casino development, paying tribute to a visiting French novelist attempting a Gauguin-style creative exile, or simply making small talk with fellow patrons at the sleazy neighborhood nightclub...every encounter is a negotiation and a performance." It's the endless slow unrolling of these that makes Pacifiction, as Lodge says, as do many, "Curiously hypnotic."

Widening the description, A.O. Scott of the New York Times called the film "John le Carré by way of David Lynch" and "a feverish and haunting but also wry and meditative rumination on power, secrecy and the color of clouds over water at sunset." Yes, it also ruminates on the, for us city dwellers, almost unhealthy lushness of tropical greenery, tropical rain, intensely tinted tropical skies. Their beauty is cloying, and Serra seeks out carefully here, with premeditation, the enhanced creepiness of vast moral evil when observed in a setting of postcard-perfect loveliness.

The slowness is part of Serra's working process. His declared method is to shoot fast and play out slow. Many hours of film were shot in only four days. The shooting was supervised by dp Artur Tort in 16mm. with three 4K Black Magic Pocket Cameras with zoom lenses with cameramen working autonymously. The successive scenes are all autonymous too, not fully defined as relating to each other. They are spliced together, the way the surrealists made their "Exquisite Corpse" foldups of separate drawings whose connection the artists didn't know. Binding Pacifiction's image-world is what Lee Marshall of Screen Daily calls "a rich soundscape that pushes the oneiric envelope and takes certain scenes into paranoid-thriller genre territory." There is a restrained, satisfyingly spooky score by Marc Verdaguer and Joe Robinson that becomes particularly effective with the empty, haunting final images.

The methods are willfully unconventional: at least Serra means them to be. And how it all fits together depends as much on our imaginations as this artistry. This is the beauty of Beenoît Magimel as an actor. Kept ignorant of script, with storyline an outmoded concept, Magimmel contributes the unifying source of a series of Rorschach blots that almost mean something. We put them together in our minds helped by the conviction Magimel brings. Kurt Brokaw in The Independent admiringly described this "slowest slow-burner in many a season" as "a picture that coils around you and then starts squeezing in," working "on the disturbing premise that what happened in a distant past was a prelude to what’s going to happen again." The result, in another rave, this time from Christian Blauvelt of IndieWire, is that this is "the art film of the year," but perhaps also Serra's most accessible.

Pacifiction/Pacifiction-Tourment sur les îles, 162 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 26, 2022. It was also shown at Munich, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Beijing and dozens of other international festivals, including Toronto, New York (in the Main Slate), Vienna, Tokyo and Taipei. The film has won great admiration among French critic s; not so much with the French audience. Its AlloCiné press rating is 4.0 (80%); audience rating 2.7 (56%). Magimel won the César for Best Actor, becoming the first male actor ever to do so a second year in a row, 2022's being for Émanuelle Bercot's Peaceful/De son vivant. Metacritic rating: 75%. Pacifiction received limited US theatrical release February 17, 2023. It now is on Mubi and Amazon Prime video.

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STILL FROMPACIICTION

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BENOÎT MAGIMEL, PAHOA MAHAGAFANAU IN PACIFICTIONA