A still from “Pacification.” Curtesy of IMDB.

There is a certain type of middle-aged white man who blusters through life while purporting to have more authority than he has — unless he couldn’t care less about your cause, at which point he holds his hands up, smirks smugly, and claims he’s powerless to help you. De Roller (a dangerously charming Benoît Magimel), the protagonist of Catalan auteur Albert Serra’s most recent offering “Pacifiction,” is one such man. Stationed on Tahiti as France’s High Commissioner, De Roller spends his days swaggering from meeting to pointless meeting in perfectly starched white blazers that would make Tommy Bahama’s founders cry. His job, as he puts it, is to “keep everyone happy;” schmoozing with both indigenous Tahitians’ representatives and other members of the French government and military posted on the island. Much of his role during the two hours and forty-five minutes of  “Pacifiction” is simply talking. De Roller talks people down, talks people into doing him favors, and talks relentlessly at transgender hotel receptionist Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) in an inscrutable manner that doesn’t quite read as flirtation but certainly doesn’t register as ordinary conversation either. And the more he talks, the more the audience can see that he doesn’t have quite as strong a handle on the rising tension that is threatening to change the landscape of French Polynesia forever.

“There are rumors…” is the key phrase that “Pacifiction” turns on; one repeated by many characters throughout the film. Tahitian girls purportedly visit a French submarine in the middle of the Pacific every night, but the submarine itself proves much more elusive than a submerged hunk of metal bobbing off the coast of a resort island should. Talk of the French government resuming nuclear testing in Polynesia abounds, but neither De Roller, the mysterious American delegates on the island, nor the eccentric French sea captain known only as The Admiral (Marc Susini), seem to know anything about it. As the audience’s (and France’s) man on the inside, De Roller acts as our lens through which to view these events, setting up a narrative that becomes increasingly difficult to pick apart — mostly because, for all his top-dog blustering, De Roller has no idea what is actually going on. He meets with the right people, makes the right noises, and enjoys beautiful Tahitian sunsets from all the right angles; but nothing is ever truly done. Only once during  the film does he look bewildered for a split second, when there is finally nobody around to see his bewilderment at the unrelenting confusion of post-colonial Tahiti’s bureaucratic nightmare.

“Current films tend to be dreadfully explanatory and didactic,” said Serra, in an interview with Emmanuel Burdeau in May 2022. “I feel as though they’re addressing children who ceaselessly need to have everything explained to them. Conversely, mine seem perfectly normal to me.” Coming from the director who made the equally unconventionally-paced “The Death of Louis XIV,” those expecting a standard political thriller or easy answers will be endlessly frustrated by “Pacifiction.” Less of an anti-colonial firecracker and more of a Lynchian lucid dream, the film purposely obfuscates clarity for both its viewers and De Roller. As we watch on in confusion, De Roller, the audience’s mirror, endlessly wheedles others for information to no avail. Artur Tort’s incorporation of tight close-up shots to exclude environmental storytelling and context clues from viewers heightens our sense of alienation, sometimes to the point of complete cluelessness. The most notable instance of this comes when De Roller visits Shannah at her house briefly before driving off… but when morning comes, we are immediately thrown into a ten-minute sequence of conversation between the two as De Roller reclines in a deckchair and writes in his notebook. Tort only allows us to view their heads and shoulders at most; forcing us to guess entirely where they actually are and whatever transpired between this scene and the last. What is the context of his second visit? When did he even get here? Why are his clothes different? And perhaps most importantly, what is the true nature (and power dynamic) of his connection with Shannah? 

It would be so easy for Serra to descend into cheap titillation and sleaze; painting De Roller as a standard lecherous political greasebag, or uncharitably turning Shannah into a power-hungry gold-digger. But he insists on establishing them as complex, unique characters on their own; and much like everyone we know in real life, we will never truly be able to comprehend their motives. Such is the fundamental ambiguity of human connection. At times, Shannah’s furtive glances at De Roller and her gushing statements about how she “would love to take the place of his secretary” allude to some kind of Freudian sexual attraction; at others, she nods at his incoherent soliloquies and looks around tetchily like she wishes she was anywhere but next to him. As for De Roller, it is equally hard for us to tell if he is using Shannah as an information broker for intel that the more hostile Indigenous Tahitians would never give him, or if he is actually drawn to her too. The chemistry — less sexual and more intellectual — between Magimel and Mahagafanau is utterly magnetic whenever they share the screen, and unspooling the threads of their connection is likely to keep viewers hanging on even through the film’s less coherent moments.

At its heart, despite the countless moving parts and political machinations afoot, “Pacifiction” is simply a mood piece about the “illusion of politics” and the bureaucratic fog that swirls around colonial administrations. De Roller even says as much himself, in a remarkable monologue shot (in classic Serra fashion) in a stationary, rain-speckled Mercedes Benz next to an acquaintance struggling not to fall asleep. “Politics is just people in the dark who don’t look at each other anymore,” he says. “It’s the devil’s nightclub.” Buoyed up by excellent musical direction, Serra’s hallucinatory vision of politicking in French Polynesia certainly does come off like the second season of “Twin Peaks,” as “Pacifiction” culminates in a psychosexual neon-tinged lucid dream of a club scene. Set to throbbing bass and cast only in purple light as figures meander past each other; speaking without words, it makes the concert scene from “Mulholland Drive” look almost amateur, and drives home Serra’s conceptual vision for the film in place of a traditional denouement.

“Pacifiction” won’t be for everybody — one has to go in knowing that answers will remain out of reach for almost all of it. Ironically, for all its inaccessibility, “Pacifiction” is also the closest that Serra has come to creating a commercially viable film, especially given David Lynch’s recent mainstream renaissance. Part character study and part slow-burn mood piece, audiences that are willing and able to discard conventional expectations for a film’s narrative will undoubtedly be sucked into Serra’s hypnotic whirlpool of lies, greed, and ignorance.