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Niche director Albert Serra's newest film Pacifiction, recently released in Argentina, was initially only a backup choice for the 2022 Cannes Film Festival's competition section, though it did eventually obtain the last slot. Its 165-minute runtime and its slow pace made it almost insufferable for the general public, making it highly unlikely to gain success.
But fate had designed a strange trajectory for this movie. Although Pacifiction failed to win any awards at Cannes, it received rave reviews from the French media, with four and five stars being awarded by these tough-to-please critics, including the famed magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which unreservedly called the film "the only masterpiece of this year's Festival" and "The Best Film of 2022".
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From a dark horse that no one expected to win, to a film phenomenon of the year, the reception that Pacifiction went through has undergone such a transformation, partly because it must have hit the sore spot of the French and the European consciousness.
Pacifiction is set in French Polynesia. With its eternal summer climate and breathtaking beauty, this South Pacific archipelago is a paradise and the last Eden for the modern mind. But beneath the surface of paradise, there is a conspiracy running in secret.
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The arrival of a group of marines on the island kicks off the movie's suspenseful plot. Rumors spread on the island that nuclear testing, which has been halted for more than two decades, will soon be carried out in Polynesia by the French government. This is bad news for the local people, who have already suffered from nuclear tests during the Cold War, and some of the radiation-induced illnesses have been passed on to the next generation of children.
To avoid repeating the disaster, the locals naturally unite to defend their rights. The difficult task of calming them down while simultaneously making the French government happy falls to the French high commissioner, De Roller (Benoît Magimel). A symbol of the sovereign's benevolent strategy, he maintains good relations with local politicians, businessmen, and clan leaders, while at the same time makes friends with the new French aristocrats who have set foot on the island, and helps them to extract as much profit as they can from the island and its inhabitants.
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We can learn a lot about De Roller by looking at his exterior appearance alone: his slightly bulky, blonde figure is clearly a visual metaphor for a fallen empire. At the same time, however, De Roller disguises his bulkiness with a suit and tie made of the finest materials, and insists on a French elegance that keeps his speeches to himself, interspersing them with witticisms that emphasize his aesthetic and lifestyle tastes even when he does want to talk about important matters, as if it were vulgar to interrupt the leisurely pace of this paradise island.
But the mask he has created for himself is gradually peeling away as the story progresses: the possibility of a potential nuclear test increases, and De Roller is therefore less and less able to hold himself together on a rational and emotional level. He is still absorbed in the atmosphere and scenery of the island, but the ominous signs on the horizon permeate every inch of the air like toxins. He couldn't see exactly what was going on, but he could sense with his intuition that everything was marching slowly but surely toward destruction.
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It is his colonial identity that ultimately creates De Roller's limitations. His entire frustration stems from the fact that there is nothing he can do as a French official: sandwiched between the local population, the French government, and the leering American forces, his room for maneuver is virtually nil. But as a colonizer living too comfortably in a territory that doesn't belong to him, powerlessness and immobility are probably what he should have accepted - a situation that, on a larger level, refers to France's status as a fallen empire caught between the geopolitical cracks of several rising powers. This is perhaps the allegorical quality of Pacifiction that strikes at the heart of the French.
But there are those who do not want to resign themselves to their fate in the vast system. This type of figure is represented by the French Admiral who is suspected of being in charge of the nuclear testing mission, with an empirical dream still burning in his heart, even if his ambitions will only lead the whole squad to its doom. De Roller and the Admiral have different levels of delirium, but their colonial biases drive them both to madness: De Roller thinks that the nuclear tests are a government conspiracy against him personally to prevent him from continuing to live his life at ease, while the Admiral believes that he can establish a new world order through his bravery, and that the reckless actions of him and his men will eventually be understood by his compatriots as a heroic undertaking.
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Pacifiction's fragmented narrative, its deconstruction of genre conventions, characterizations, and relationships between the characters, remind us of Antonioni's anti-genre detective films. In terms of thematic expression, however, Pacifiction is more akin to Joseph Conrad's exotic novels: how a sober, civilized protagonist becomes increasingly insane under the influence of a crisis-ridden natural environment.
But let's note one thing: Conrad's work is, after all, a product of the 19th century, and has not escaped the influence of colonialist thinking. In these novels, the aborigines appear more as a heterogeneous object as opposed to civilization, and seldom can they become subjects with souls, ideas, and desires, to be substituted and understood by readers. The same problem occurs in Pacifiction, which was born in the post-colonial era: although the images of aborigines in the film are vivid, they are more like background objects and aesthetic embellishments, or even imaginative projections born in the subjective mind of the protagonist.
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This is the ultimate limitation of Pacifiction. The plight of the colonizer's soul, fascinating as it is, has been told too many times before, and in this day and age, such a theme is not something we need to focus on. Perhaps the greatest point of Pacifiction's existence is to provide yet another sample of pathology - to watch how the protagonist from the so-called civilized world once again loses the last vestiges of his sanity in a so-called “jungle” that he never managed to understand.
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