Writing a capsule on Albert Serra's PACIFICTION for the Reverse Shot 2023 Top Ten

Albert Serra’s first present-day film steers us into a cinematic register at the intersection of Chris Marker and Michael Mann, at once naturalistic and surreal, sublime and subliminal. Benoît Magimel’s De Roller is the slippery, white-suited High Commissioner to French Polynesia, an intoxicating South Pacific collectivity of paradisiacal beauty and colonial chicanery, teeming with stories true and untrue, between myth and deception. De Roller’s power is ebbing, though you wouldn’t know it at first as he parades about the island, mingling with the local nightclub’s Ori Tahiti dancers and taking meetings with concerned locals. One of the islanders, Shanna (Māhū actress Pahoa Mahagafanau), the film’s only open-book character, detects his vulnerability early and reverses the political polarity by becoming his protector and companion. As the sea of intrigue rises and De Roller’s obscure, aesthetically bewitching fantasies begin to emerge, we sense his hold on things listing, then slipping away. His principal antagonist, the slight, whey-faced “Admiral” (Marc Susini), whose naval cap doesn’t quite fit, brings to mind Delphin Servaux’s headmaster in Vigo’s Zero for Conduct—comically grotesque and all the more intimidating for that. By prolonging each sequence beyond its natural duration, Serra calibrates the action to the oneiric pace of that world and underscores the extent of De Roller’s impotence and the emptiness of his monologues. The Admiral’s final speech—from a disgraced colonial power which treats its “property” as a nuclear testing ground—blows the film off course, lurching on waves of imbecilic patriotism, running Serra’s film aground in a dreadful reality: to France’s eternal, devastating shame.