Serra’s interests are as cosmic here as they are political. Outside of these anchoring points, the plot is as seductive as it is elliptical: it has all the hallmarks of a film that demands multiple viewings, though I feel its deepest mysteries may remain buried. The mood is feverish, dreamlike, and little is explained.
Will nuclear testing in the region resume? Navy men have started frequenting the local nightclubs and a mysterious man with a British accent and slicked back hair is on the prowl. During one of the film’s miraculous sunsets he appears to spot one peeking above the water. It follows De Roller (Benoît Magimel, slick and mannered in graphite-blue tinted sunglasses), a representative of the French state on the island of Tahiti in French Polynesia.Īs Pacification begins, De Roller is attempting to get plans together to build a casino but becomes paranoid at rumors that a submarine is close by. Pacifiction is his first to come anywhere close to the present day. Pacifiction is that sensation: a film unlike any other this year, appearing near the end of proceedings, with the festival’s final furlongs already in sight it is the closest the selection has come to delivering a masterpiece.įor the best part of the last 20 years, the Catalan filmmaker has made radical, provocative films operating in the deliciously macabre sweet spot where history and mythology overlap: stories about Dracula and Casanova ( Story of My Death), French libertines idly fucking in the woods ( Liberté), the death of a King ( Louis XIV), and no less than the birth of Christ ( Birdsong). It premiered in a Cannes competition that has been high on wattage but low on power, crying out for a sensation. It doesn’t taste or smell like other films, either, even Serra’s own distinctive body of work. “ Unfuckable is, you take the whole thing or you don’t take it but you cannot apply a critical judgment in an easy way,” he explained to us in 2019, “because it is what it is and it doesn’t look like any other film.” Pacifiction does not look like any other film. Pacifiction is what Albert Serra might describe as an unfuckable movie.