With the arrival of marines at Tahiti, a rumor springs to life that locals have spotted a military submarine not far from the coast, heralding the return of French nuclear missile testing in their waters.  The rumors are unavoidable to De Roller (Benoît Magimel), the High Commissioner, who walks the fine line of a playboy but with high society manners, as the locals express their concern over what the resumption of testing will mean for their tourism-fueled businesses.  As De Roller investigates, he gets involved in a deep and dark plot, but one that may also be fueled by his own paranoia and desire to uncover a truth that may be little more than fiction. 

Albert Serra directs Magimel in a tour de force performance in his latest film, Pacifiction, a tropical dream-like thriller co-written with Baptiste Pinteaux and highlighted as part of Mubi’s Spotlight series.  After a 2022 Cannes premiere that beguiled audiences, the film went on to land Serra a César, a Lumiere, and an ICS Award for Best Director, among a host of other nominations from the various festival and critical bodies for the film, cast, and craft departments.  With a 165-minute runtime and only a vague notion of plot, Pacifiction is a tough film to crack into, but Artur Tort’s cinematography and Ariadna Ribas’ – along with Serra and Tort’s – editing help steep the mystery so that, even without a clear idea of where the film is headed, audiences do not feel lost at sea. Almost undefinable, as slow cinema so often is, Serra’s film still finds plenty of inertia to keep things moving along striking the pitch-perfect balance between tone and story; as if Apichatpong Weerasethakul had directed Inherent Vice (2014) instead of Paul Thomas Anderson.  

Centered around Magimel’s De Roller, Pacifiction asks a tremendous amount of the actor who must walk the line of being totally in control of a situation he has increasingly little control over.  Serra’s script creates the sense of a mystery without ever giving anything away as De Roller investigates claims that nuclear testing will soon begin off the shores of the island.  It is a powerhouse performance and an absolute miracle that Magimel is even able to make sense of the material as the film offers little answers, only questions, and other than living and working in the pursuit to serve his own needs, De Roller is a chameleon when it comes to ethics and morals.  One such example that takes a prominent position over the course of the film is his strange relationship with Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau), implied to be romantic and possibly sexual, it becomes just another mystery of De Roller and thus, another mystery of Pacifiction.  To view Shannah as a figure that somehow holds the key to unlocking the film as the only one who might see through De Roller’s façade is an easy mistake to make, but Serra refuses us answers as Shannah is under De Roller’s spell just as much as they are out of it. 

Without much in the way of plot to develop, Pacifiction certainly must be dealing in the realm of theme, though even there Serra asks the audience to infer a lot.  Immediately, the film conjures up feelings about colonialism and political influence and control. Following shortly behind the tails of these explorers, as so often is the case, the industrial military that will seize indigenous land and make it their own all in the name of progress.  The backdrop for the story is the rumor of nuclear testing and how that will impact the tourism industry which the island needs to survive.  The beauty of the island is undeniable and Tort’s camera captures it at its most stunning and at all times of day: the beautiful waves of the ocean under the sun, the same waters hiding secrets during a golden sunset, and finally, at night, the ocean turns dark and ominous, prepared to swallow whole any soul foolish enough to venture off the coast. Pacifiction is not a film that seeks to really explore the battle between nature and man, but it often finds itself witness to the struggle as man tries to conquer the island. 

Opposite the beauty of the island, there is depravity, and it is an examination of the rot that Serra seems most interested in pursuing with his film.  Here, it takes many forms, one of the more blatant examples in the form of cock fighting, but even this abuse against animals, Serra posits, can be turned into something beautiful as it becomes the centerpiece for a new dance show at the resort.  It is the clearest metaphor throughout the wide breadth of Pacifiction showing that the poverty of the people can be polished and packaged for the enjoyment of the rich.  Extrapolating this idea further, Pacifiction shows an island that has been turned into a playground for the powerful as they use their influence to cater to their own whims and desires.  This is shown repeatedly throughout the film as the old Navy captain (Mark Susini) spends his drunken nights at the resort bar, coaxing his young sailors to join him amongst the scantily clad local male dancers on the pink and purple lit dancefloor.  It is all a game of power and influence, and whoever is on top can bend the will of those beneath them. While De Roller does not outwardly participate in these activities, though he does oversee the new dance as part of his assumed duties at the resort, he certainly does not feel an innocent man in all of this and while we may struggle to name his transgressions outright, he is just as corrupt as the people he is seeking to expel from “his” island, though he is just better at hiding it. 

Pacifiction is a difficult film that had it not been so formally engaging, it would have been written off as an unmitigated disaster; though some of the walkout crowd at Cannes will certainly still call it as such.  With its methodical pacing, very little is accomplished across its runtime and the more the mystery is examined, the less we come away feeling we understand what is happening.  Serra is not interested in a traditional plot or political thriller despite his film having all the trappings of one – luscious locations, missing passports, and rigged elections to name a few – but instead, he creates a simmering atmosphere that never quite boils over in an eruption yet still has incredible power in the final forty minutes or so when everything comes to a head.  The climax, as with the rest of the film, is delivered with incredible subtlety: a rambling monologue from De Roller about the struggles of political power to his chauffeur who could not be less disinterested in his boss’ plights, a midnight meeting with his political opponents at a rain-drenched football pitch, and it gives way to – for lack of a better term – a frantic chase sequence on the dark surrounding ocean.  Finally, at dawn, an answer is given as cryptically and laboriously as everything else that came before it, but this ominous punctuation gives audiences who stayed with the film this long a dreadful sense of closure unique in that it is one of the few times we are privy to something De Roller is not and ironic that it is the only mystery of Pacifiction which Serra chooses to resolve, revealing once and for all that De Roller is nothing but a fraud who hides his lack of control behind designer sunglasses and his university vocabulary.