“It’s fascinating to film today’s world and I do it without any ideology […] I’m only interested in photos.” That’s what Albert Serra says in a press statement for his new film Pacification. Although this is more or less impossible, Serra’s new film does indeed create something very close to this idea of pure cinema, where the power of the art form itself transcends everything else. As he says, “This was our idea: to suppress in editing anything that, as it referred to a social problem, didn’t fit the pure cinematic license.”
The resulting film is a truly cryptic yet compelling epic that uses the power of cinema to practically put viewers in a trance. Pacification wears the skin of a political thriller like The parallax view or The conversation, but it is only a loose piece of clothing used to dress an apparition, a hypnotic and haunting study of problems in paradise. It’s a slow and often confusing movie, and like real hypnosis you have to submit to it to be rewarded.
Nightclubs and Colonialism on the Island Paradise of Pacifiction
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Pacification follows a government official named The Roller, a name that accurately evokes the connotations of a “high roller.” The Roller is the High Commissioner of the Republic, a mysterious French diplomat who oversees local affairs in Tahiti and represents the French state. Tahiti is part of French Polynesia, a cluster of islands and atolls that are semi-autonomous in their function yet clearly influenced by French politics. This contemporary remnant of earlier European colonialism is the often incongruous setting of Pacification.
The Roller walks authoritatively over the island, looking like a wealthy Parisian on vacation in his white suit, sunglasses and smile, while the Tahitians wear floral shirts and skirts, culturally specific clothing or none at all. The Frenchman stands out and that is partly his point (that of De Roller and Serra). He holds court in a dim nightclub, sits in the dark with his sunglasses on like a Corey Hart number, answers a few questions, offers some advice, and inquires about local affairs. Sex work, corruption and drugs linger in the atmosphere of this damp place; it’s all literally shady.
He becomes aware that naval officers have camped practically offshore, hidden by the waves in their submarine. At night, they bring prostitutes from the island aboard the submarine before landing them again in the morning, sometimes with more bruises and marks than they started with. When De Roller investigates, he finds himself entangled in a larger and much stickier web of political intrigue than he imagined.
Pacifiction gently removes the tension from thriller
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Aside from being drunken hooligans, the military are in Pacification rumor has it that they are starting a series of nuclear tests on the island. This understandably alarms the local population, who have been hit by generations of nuclear fallout – after all France actually explodes 41 above-ground nuclear weapons in French Polynesia Between 1966 and 1974, France blew up 41 nuclear weapons in a series of above-ground tests, exposing 90% of the population to radiation.
Led by a frankly apocalyptic admiral (a man so enamored with nuclear holocaust that he makes General Patton look like a pacifist), the military presence haunts the island from their submerged, caliginous depths in the ocean. The Roller begins conversations with several local leaders and tries to involve the Admiral, but slowly realizes that he is just a small, pathetic cog in an invisible machine, a petty bureaucrat whose life may now be threatened by larger political forces.
If this all sounds exciting, bear in mind – it isn’t, or at least not in the way you might think. Despite its conspiracy thriller intrigue, Pacification is a far cry from, say, Bourne’s Identity or Enemy of the State; hell, it makes the cold, stark minimalism of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy looks like a Michael Bay movie. No, Pacification is an extremely icy film that draws its suspense not from suspense or bombastic set pieces, but rather from its truly cinematic, intensely hypnotic construction and fascinating politics.
Politics is a nightclub in the Hazy Film Pacifiction
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Albert Serra may only be in his forties, but he directs the kind of films that a wizened old arthouse master like Michael Haneke or Béla Tarr would make. Pacification exists somewhere in between his previous death-obsessed films (The story of my death, the death of Louis XIV) and his more recent sex-obsessed (Liberté), which is fitting for a film that brings the threat of nuclear Armageddon to the prostitutes and nightclubs of an island paradise. It’s that hazy oscillation between hopeless death and sexy beauty that helps to… Pacification so enchanting.
Serra’s vision of the island lends itself to a dark fantasy that cannot exist in reality (hence the contraction of the title). French Polynesia is almost by definition an impossible place, a nonexistent paradox of a place, a designation that only suits governments. In reality, just as a hammer can’t be a nail, Tahiti can’t be France (and Puerto Rico can’t be America, and so on).
Colonialism has tried to adapt over time with more tacit and politically correct terminology and tactics, but Pacification points out that this is a logical contradiction. The film is set in that liminal space where the old imperial politics rot, leaving the festering corpse of ideology to stink the otherwise paradisiacal places of previously occupied territories.
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At one point in the movie, The Roller, “Politics is a nightclub.” At once decadent, cynical and naive, this concept is illustrated everywhere both figuratively and literally Pacification. It’s abstract enough to be mysterious, licentious enough to be grotesque, and hopeless enough to be depressing, while never condescendingly tell the audience, “This is how it is.”
Instead, to quote Serra’s press release again: “Everything is blurry in Pacification […] I think current films are often terribly explanatory and didactic. I have the feeling that they appeal to children who need to be explained to them incessantly.” Pacification becomes a paranoid tone poem, a beautiful canvas on which viewers can project their own ideologies.
The pure cinema of Albert Serra
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Serra edited 540 hours of footage (180 hours on any Canon Black Magic Pocket camera) into this nearly three-hour film that, once a viewer has submitted to it, truly feels like it could go on forever, as if it were slowly merging. with the weird, bleak fantasy that has become real politics. Somehow, without ever making a traditionally stimulating or exciting film, Serra combines every cinematic tool to practically induce hypnosis.
Beyond the Tahitian tones accompanying certain beautifully crafted sequences with relentless percussion, Marc Verdaguer and Joe Robinson’s mostly electronic score has an almost subliminal influence (and even more trance-like when brought to the surface in some almost disturbing nightclub scenes). This is a wonderful addition to Artur Tort’s photography, who not only captures the sheer beauty of the islands, but also manages to make it otherworldly at times, occasionally scaling down the characters in a world much larger. than they could ever know (or at least much more different from what they assumed).
The beautiful performances of Pacifiction
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The acting (and the utterly unique way Serra directs actors, using earphones and spontaneous dialogue) adds to the hypnotic effect. People here often speak in riddles, or with such superficiality that their artifice reveals something more mysterious. Whispers and glances dominate the film, escalating the sense of paranoia and tension, and the entire cast is phenomenal at maintaining Serra’s understated, mysterious tone.
Benoît Magimel is absolutely wonderful as The Roller, who perfectly balances the haughtiness of high hierarchical status with curiosity, attention and confusion as he digs deeper into his own meaninglessness on the island. He is a fascinating character, endearing and desperate to transcend his own banality and insignificance (“I immediately saw it in [Magimel] a rarely found ability to be both sincere and superficial,” Serra said).
Pahoa Mahagafanau is an absolute star here as Shannah, the choreographer of the dancers in the nightclub; unbelievable, this is the first and only role for Mahagafanau, a mahu actress who is ravishing as one of the few warm and genuinely charming characters in this dark, conspiratorial film.
Pacifiction is hypnotic, but not for people who get bored easily
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Because all these components merge seamlessly, the 160 minutes Pacification casts a spell of pure cinema. It has been said that no one can be hypnotized if they do not want to, and like hypnosis itself, Pacification requires the openness (or total submission) of the viewer. Since there is such a thing as hypnotic susceptibility (even Harvard and Stanford have scientific scales for this), there should also be an understanding of “cinematic susceptibility,” or a viewer’s tolerance for pure cinema without much exposition, plot, or drama. Any audience with a high cinematic sensitivity should easily succumb to the hypnosis of Pacification.
To achieve this, of course, Serra had to remove every bit of excess fat from political thriller stories, so that even the flesh underneath was ripped from the bones. The filmmaker has butchered the genre in a way that will no doubt bore most regular moviegoers, but the skeleton he’s unveiled is a polished, enchanting and atmospheric thing of beauty, a skeletal enchantment that cinephiles and fans of arthouse movies are sure to fall under. fall.
From Grasshopper movies and gratitude movies, Pacification is a production of Idéale Audience Group, Andergraun Films, Tamtam Film and Rosa Filmes, and a co-production of ARTE France Cinéma, Bayerischer Rundfunk and Archipel Production. After showing at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, Pacification will be screened at the Chicago International Film Festival on October 16 and 22 for a later, wider release.