You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump.
It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns up regularly in other people’s work – for example in The Tailor of Panama (writer John Le Carré obviously channelling Greene) and in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (Denis Johnson doing the same).
And so to our man in Havana. Tahiti, in fact, where the compromised hero is a gent called De Roller. Dressed in a white suit throughout, he’s the French High Commissioner on this small French outpost in the Pacific Ocean, a long, long way from Paris. Though he’s the big noise on the island, he uses an iron-fist-velvet-glove approach, working the bars and clubs of the island to keep abreast of what’s going on, which is where he first encounters a mysterious admiral (Marc Susini) taking in the barely dressed young men serving drinks in the club run by Morton (Sergi Lopéz), an associate of De Roller.
But no one turns up on Tahiti for no reason. Are the rumours of a submarine parked offshore true?
As whispers start circulating that the French are about to restart nuclear testing in the area, De Roller puts himself about on the island even more, talking to hothead locals determined to start agitating, schmoozing the admiral, hoping he’ll let something slip while drunk. In familiar Graham Greene fashion, around him wheels a carnival procession of mysterious and exotic types. The drunk Portuguese guy called Ferreira (Alexandre Melo) who has little reason to be there. The effeminate or possibly trans hotel receptionist Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau). A rich guy scoping a hotel redevelopment (Baptiste Pinteaux, who co-adapted with director Albert Serra). A novelist there for inspiration ((Montse Triola). A mysterious nodding woman in shades who is never introduced by name. Plus chauffeurs, sex workers, DJs, jetski operators – holiday island workers.
Director Serra and co-writer Pinteaux keep us guessing as to what’s going on vis-a-vis the submarine and the testing, but also precisely how much De Roller knows about what’s going on. Meanwhile Serra and his DP, Artur Tort, present a picture of Tahiti that’s heightened, gauzy, picture-postcard-unreal, hyper-lush.
Serra shot hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage – it’s the way he works – allowing his actors to freestyle their way through scenes. Benoît Magimel, the powerhouse who plays the high commissioner, is in pretty much all of them, as De Roller wheedles and coaxes, flatters and threatens his way to some sort of understanding about what’s going on, and how he fits in to it all (if he does at all).
It is a brilliant and, yes, very Graham Greene-esque portrait of the colonial functionary whose exact status is always in question. Beneath the white suit De Roller always wears a gaudy shirt, a suggestion he might have gone native.
Pacifiction is at its best in its long setup, which is all shady people in shady corners and De Roller bouncing sweatily between them while trying to maintain a cool facade. The big finish – as characters are moved into place in a way reminiscent of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – possibly overdoes the long speechifying by De Roller, and there are a couple of scenes which, brilliantly evocative though they are, do not add much to the forward thrust.
Perhaps you need to be a former colonial power to pull these sort of films off. Which is why the Americans don’t make them so well – they’re still in that game. Like the Brits, the French know what it is all about to still be hanging on by a fingernail in some far-flung corner of the world. Pacifiction captures a colonial project on its final lap, runing blind and incapable of distinguishing the ripe and the rotten.
Pacifiction – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
