Pacifiction: a hazy tropical fantasia

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra is now clearly outpacing his spiritual mentor Andy Warhol in moving into the arthouse mainstream. He still feels free to ignore his own written script, still uses three digital cameras to shoot hundreds of hours of footage from which he selects the bits that please him, still works predominantly with non-professional actors. But as his runtimes grow ever longer and his characters and locales ever more exotic, so his impulses to shape his material more conventionally and to work with bankable ‘names’ grow proportionately stronger.

Pacifiction – the working title was Bora Bora – is a discursive and deliberately hazy tropical fantasia centred on De Roller (Benoît Magimel), the French-appointed high commissioner of an island in the South Pacific, who learns the hard way that his ‘authority’ is a mirage in a postcolonial world of conspiracies and political manoeuvring. Early scenes sketch his very comfortable work/leisure balance; then rumours that France plans a resumption of nuclear testing nearby plunge him into what seem to be delusions and paranoid fantasies.

In ways that will surprise admirers of Honour of the Knights (2006) and Birdsong (2008), some elements of the film are surprisingly conventional. There are plentiful establishing shots of buildings, landscapes and the ocean, there’s the odd point-of-view shot, there are tightly edited conversation scenes with cross-cut closeups and carefully scripted dialogue, and there’s even a framing device: it opens with a naval powerboat arriving in the island’s harbour and closes with the same boat’s night-time departure from the same quay.

Against such concessions to orthodoxy, though, Serra’s methods remain committedly aleatory and anti-narrative. (As he says in a press-kit interview: “I think that current films tend to be dreadfully explanatory and didactic. I feel as though they’re addressing children who ceaselessly need to have everything explained to them. Conversely, mine seems perfectly normal to me.”) Although a characteristic vein of absurdist humour clouds the picture, the film makes sense only as a refraction of De Roller’s increasingly flaky psyche, with scenes suggesting his dawning awareness of his political impotence and irrelevance, his sexual ambivalence, his fear of persecution and ultimately his anarchic impulses.

Inevitably, there’s collateral damage to the film’s narrative integrity. A Portuguese man (evidently a journalist or spy in De Roller’s mind) gets a whole scene to complain about the theft of his passport but is seen just twice more, once more or less comatose, before De Roller is told that his papers were recovered and he’s left the island. Similarly a French woman novelist (played by real-life writer Cécile Guilbert) is introduced and fairly quickly forgotten. These were presumably plot strands that didn’t yield footage to fire Serra’s imagination.

Meanwhile, the striking ‘third gender’ character Shannah (played by Pahoa Mahagafanau, billed second), introduced briefly as a hotel receptionist, becomes a ubiquitous presence. De Roller starts to regard her as a psychic twin and the agent of his fantasies of attacking unspecified enemies; per Serra, this wasn’t scripted but “just happened, because I really love Shannah”. The character’s prominence, along with the many scenes in a louche nightclub run by Morton (Sergi López, given hardly any dialogue) and his portly assistant Lois (Serra’s fetish actor Lluis Serrat; he has appeared in all the features, often given Fassbinder-related character names) makes Pacifiction Serra’s gayest film yet. The disco is staffed by Polynesian men and women in their underwear and the cruisiest customer is an enigmatic French naval officer (Marc Susini, from Serra’s 2019 film Liberté) who harmlessly chats up the boys but eventually turns fascistic – at least in De Roller’s mind.

Social and political issues are calculatedly sidelined throughout, but when the club’s topless woman DJ spins Freddy Butler’s soul classic ‘I Like Your Style’ under cold blue lights, a sense of impending doom becomes palpable. As De Roller comes to hate his offscreen masters in Paris, he compares them with people in a discothèque “thinking they control everything”. The real issue, of course, is his own failing grasp of events and of his own colonial role. Few would file this as a ‘political’ movie, but the spectacle of De Roller’s psychological disintegration carries at least a little of the weight of a postcolonial critique. Although the result is as far from agitprop as Serra can make it, it works surprisingly well as an ‘exotic’ rumination on what’s it’s like to surf the giant waves off a postcolonial beach.

► Pacifiction is in UK cinemas from Friday 21 April.