PACIFICTION – TOURMENT SUR LES ÎLES

Albert Serra
High commissioner De Roller, who represents the French government in French Polynesia, tries to make his way through the forces involved, in a wild, political-fiction version of contemporary Tahiti. French actor Benoît Magimel recreates a body of images for himself under our baffled eyes. Both of them, in their off-white colonial suit, try with all their strength to keep a human form under the pressure of everything that is going to pieces (both the world and the film around them). Pacifiction, Serra’s latest film, causes a sensation: it is a pure cinema fantasy that gets high only to crash against the islands of today’s reality, a period sci-fi film, a documentary on its own fiction; it resumes and goes over the director’s previous motifs, but at the same time it takes them somewhere else, towards another future. We even witness the birth of love in Albert Serra’s work – so strong for being the cruellest, now he seems able to welcome and embrace everything else, including what eludes him, caught in the net of his great mise- en-scene of power. Now that he has mastered the free forms and the secrets of subversive art, which had pushed him to explore the connections between cinema and death, Serra can start to film life again. (L.C.)