In Catalan director Albert Serra’s elliptical allegory Pacifiction, he reaches into the dark corners of our world and brings back remnants of the structures we thought kept us in place. Musing on the powerlessness he claims we all feel today, through plot and his direction, Serra ingrains paranoia in the minds of audiences. He deals masterfully with an outmoded yet still nefariously prevalent world order.
Pacifiction is set in Tahiti and follows an unelected French state official, High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel). There’s a rumor concerning the resumption of nuclear tests in the Polynesian archipelago. In truth, the action is sometimes hard to describe. Not because the plot reads fickle but because it rarely feels literal.
The film opens with a tracking shot of static shipping containers, an apt metaphor that recalls the supply chains we were so used to before the Covid-19 pandemic, which unraveled to the brink of disruption of the Global North’s style of life. Serra has all the control, while the actors are equal to the scenery: pawns in his story. Before production begins, Serra doesn’t tell the cast the story, and nobody gets to read the script. The actors all wear earpieces and get fed lines as the cameras roll, as they figure out what to say, how to say it, and what kind of film they are in. The result is a film that echoes its character’s anxieties, where the audience is led to believe that something larger is afoot, and Serra tries to say something we don’t quite understand.
Day turns to night, and the camera follows a small military lifeboat silently transporting French seamen to the island. They’re ready to hit the club scene, where natives are paraded in scant attire for the enjoyment of foreigners. In a breakfast with local leaders the next morning, De Roller is told their presence may spell a dark foreboding. He is against nuclear tests in the archipelago. However, we are never sure if that is due to his genuine concern for the well-being of the people or because testing would severely undercut his influence and colonial entitlement over the Tahitians.
Serra revels in this ambiguity. Speaking after a screening at the 2022 New York Film Festival, he states that the nuclear theme allows for an ambiguous plot because it’s a subject nobody fully understands. It concerns the whims of the higher powers of our world, and we are left as mere spectators.
The narrative intensifies when De Roller is called to a meeting with the breakfast’s translator, Matahi (Matahi Pambrun), a budding revolutionary, and learns that the CIA is encouraging revolt on the island to halt the nuclear tests. De Roller reads the meeting as a threat to his sovereignty and warns Matahi that help from the Americans has consequences. The High Commissioner then embarks on an intelligence-gathering mission to find out the truth and, if necessary, stop the military in its tracks.
Through seduction, he enlists the assistance of a transgender hotel clerk, Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau), whom he calls his “right arm,” to decipher the mystery. He uses Shannah as a seductress to collect information on his “enemies.” He acts like James Bond but falls closer to Inspector Clouseau. Continuously spurned as out of form and incapable by the other characters, De Roller fumbles the investigation, arriving a little too early or a little too late — the action always passes him by. In a revealing scene, he flies over the island with Shannah, telling her he likes to look at it from above because it reminds him of the scale of things. In truth, it feeds his paranoia and ideas of grandeur — thinking he understands the scale of the world doesn’t mean he has any control over it.
Pacifiction mocks its protagonist by showing the audience how out of place he is. In service to a colonial enterprise that ended in the past century, De Roller lacks self-awareness, believing in his righteousness and the righteous path he follows. Serra achieves this by keeping the cast in the dark. Unaware of his journey, De Roller behaves just as any person would, with belief in himself and his actions.
The film comes to a head in a long sequence inside the club where the French seamen originally docked. Throughout the film, the images are oversaturated, hinting at the fantastical nature of the story and rendering the tale with a sense of fable. In this sequence, the action is lit by dark purple spotlights that completely overpower our sight. Besides the music, the scene is quiet; it reminded me of Nicolas Winding Refn’s work in the miniseries Too Old to Die Young. Serra lets his characters exist where the Danish filmmaker would have staged violence. By the end, if something did happen, it was not illustrated explicitly — De Roller, like the audience, is powerless and disoriented.
Pacifiction forces us to take in the structures of a world we’ve grown accustomed to, which enrich and protect the few, making life comfortable for some and stripping so many others of their agency. Serra shows us these structures in all their decadence and reminds us they haven’t been dealt with. De Roller, the Old World avatar, isn’t just a figure of the elite; he is an archetype for a life closed to itself, blinded to the larger machinations that keep him fed, clothed, and comfortable. Nonetheless, he is confident in his understanding and agency inside a system where few can profit. De Roller personifies privilege and the illusion that you are doing enough to save the world. He is a mirror into which nobody wishes to look because we all fear it will show us the truth: we know so little about ourselves and are bound to remain ignorant and content until the final blast.
The film closes like it began, with the seamen leaving the island on the same lifeboat they arrived in. This time with words: the captain of the fleet delivers a passionate speech about their place in the world as the bringers of the future. The great heroes come to save the day. Cut off from the script; every character believes they are the hero of their own story. But are they not simply pawns for a higher rank, the faces behind a bigger evil?
Pacifiction echoes a bout between humanism and a current state of affairs in which very few have knowledge of our future trajectory. In the film, we follow the kind of intrigue that seems more appropriate to the past century. Without many phones or computers, the characters seem stuck in time, and De Roller looks impotent while trying to figure out what is happening. His authority and understanding over his island became useless when the world order conspired without his knowledge. Now, it’s already too late.
In the end, there is no great explosion. The final words of the film are murky and ambiguous. What remains is powerlessness. Unlike the great nuclear film Dr. Strangelove, we are not left certain that the world is about to end. Ultimately, Pacifiction is a tantalizing allegory, a metamodernist reflection of our world, and a reminder of decadence, the malaise of our time, and the things we think we understand but have left in the shadows for so long they began to rot. We are reminded that if the world were ever to end, we wouldn’t know until after it does.
