Of Albert Serra it is possible to be said of everything except that it leaves indifferent. His movies you either love or hate. There is no middle ground for his radicalism. With Pacifiction, the only Spanish filmmaker in competition this year in the official section, he has won the majority of critics' applause with a work of enormous footage, two hours and forty-five minutes - the same as the Iranian Leila's Brothers, by Saeed Roustaee -, to embark on an original and exotic journey to the island of Tahiti and give free rein to your imagination as peculiar as it is confusing.
The High Commissioner of France travels to that distant place in Polynesia to take the pulse of a population that criticizes having been abandoned and always tries to placate the discomfort with good manners. Everything the viewer observes is through the gaze of Benoit Magimel, one of the favorites to win the award for best male performance, in a kind of hallucinogenic journey that shows daily scenes of the official, always from one side to the other. another holding meetings in his white linen suit, while having fun in a nightclub with the company of a transsexual with whom he has a mysterious relationship.
At one point, Magimel's character refers to politics as a nightclub. "There is an abandonment, a malaise in our societies. There is an increasing distance between politics and normal people", and it is something that explains "the rise of populism", said the director from Banyoles at a press conference about a story of a paradise doomed to corruption.
The origin of the film, which has gone through various titles, Bora Bora, Tourment sur les îles, until finally becoming the definitive Pacifiction, stems from reading the diaries of the Polynesian actress Tatarita Teriipaia, who was the wife of Marlon Brando and talks about traumas of colonization and alludes to the danger of the island being the target of nuclear tests.
Serra, a regular at Cannes where he has already won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section in 2019 with the erotic Liberté, defends a cinema that avoids the past and focuses "on creating the future", on how images "can be richer and more interesting than those currently available with platforms, television series or the internet".
For this, its objective is to achieve the maximum narrative and visual originality without losing sight of the ambiguity of the proposal. "The film is a fantasy, a fiction, there is a very pronounced artificial side, an improbable side," he admitted about a production that took place in full confinement, a situation that facilitates the ghostly atmosphere of some scenes.
And for a memorable scene, the one he did in the water when the High Commissioner is on a jet ski and you see people surfing and boats taking amazing waves. "It was real luck," he admits. While Sergi López remains in an almost anecdotal role, Serra chose Magimel as the protagonist, whom he met three years ago, because of his ambiguous face: "He has something disturbing that suited the character very well."
The actor, who was already awarded at Cannes for The Pianist and has won the César this year, praises the director for "the absolute freedom he gives you. Working with Serra is a completely different experience from any other filmmaker I've worked with ". It's time to see if tomorrow Pacifiction, which still doesn't have distribution in Spain, also seduces the jury chaired by Vincent Lindon and places itself in the list of winners.
