Paul Gauguin: Last News

Guy 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.