‘Pacifiction’ Review: Albert Serra’s Torpid Tahitian Getaway is Cryptic But Curiously Hypnotic
variety.comGuy Lodge Film CriticIt was Paul Gauguin, France’s most celebrated Polynesian tourist, who once wrote of “learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.” It’s a void, he wrote, in which other senses and sensory awarenesses are heightened, amplifying his sense of loneliness and separation from others: “The inhabitants of the district and I mutually watched each other, and the distance remained the same.” Gauguin isn’t mentioned in “Pacifiction,” Albert Serra’s languorous, meandering tour of modern-day Tahiti, though those words echo through its survey of the island’s distanced, distracted residents — even if the nights here aren’t as silent as the artist might remember, disrupted as they are with tinny discotheque beats, darkened trysts and the hovering, unidentified threat of nuclear warfare.
The first film by cultish Catalan provocateur Serra to crack Cannes’s competition lineup, “Pacifiction” is an unhurried, 164-minute tropical tour that is sort of about nothing and everything at once.
Slender in terms of incident, its drawn-out narrative is nonetheless rife with political tension, observing both the enduring colonialist entitlement of the French Republic territory’s Gallic custodians and the ever-itching resentment felt by its indigenous population — coming to a head under the twin threats of gentrifying development and military destruction.
The film’s contemporary setting makes it a departure of sorts from Serra’s recent run of sensuous, somnambulant period pieces — which bottomed out, so to speak, with 2019’s 18th-century erotic endurance test “Liberté” — but it’s fully consistent with his oeuvre in its hazy cultivation of mood and its merging of historical realities with daydreamed surrealism.Either way it’s a.
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