The last edition of the Cannes Festival served, among other things, to confirm the uniqueness and courage of Albert Serra (1975). The illustrious setting brought back good memories for the filmmaker from Banyoles, who burst onto the international film scene by surprise when, in 2006, he presented at the Directors’ Fortnight with Honor de cavalleria, a very free version of Don Quixote filmed among friends and with a scarcity of material means that contrasted with his brazen artistic ambition. However, despite the firmness with which Cannes had cradled and seen the radical spirit of Serra grow –an author related to what is known as slow cinema–, the filmmaker had not yet proven his worth in the main showcase of the festival: the Official Section. The opportunity came this year and, ignoring the temptation to secure the shot with a more accessible film, Serra delivered Pacifiction, a work that, in addition to repeating the heterodox cocktail of secrecy and languor that characterizes the author of Liberté, displays an acid meditation on a political class lost between unfounded delusions of grandeur, paranoia and the perpetuation of a toxic masculinity. The dazzling Pacifiction takes the viewer to Tahiti, where a high commissioner of the French state (played by a magnetic Benoît Magimel) moves like a fish in water – in the manner of Ben Gazzara in John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – by the universe of local diplomacy, a world full of small opportunities to practice patronage.
[Albert Serra: “En el cine español soy el mejor, único”]
For the first time in his film career, aside from his museum work, Serra places the action of his film at the core of a contemporaneity that reveals its most sinister side. Geopolitical tension In a gesture that can be described as prophetic –given that the film was shot before the start of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine–, Pacifiction invokes the shadow of an escalation of geopolitical tension in which France would try to recover its weight in the global scene by resuming nuclear testing in Polynesia. However, the espionage plot is articulated in such an ambiguous and uncertain way –Serra juggles Hitchcockian suspense– that the pomp and magnificence exuded by the characters seems more the result of bluffing than of factual power. As was the case with the obtuse representative of the Spanish crown in Zama, by Lucrecia Martel, or with the alienated members of the French legion in Beau Travail by Claire Denis, the creatures of Pacifiction roam the margins of History, as the last but very vivid banners of archaic empires claiming their place in a chaotic present. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Mr. De Roller (Magimel) oversees the creation of a dance performance that projects a for-export image of Polynesian culture. Thrilled by the re-enactment of a cockfight (perhaps a nod to Monte Hellman’s cryptic Cockfighter Testosterone Parade), the official orders the dancers to surrender “unceremoniously… more violently, more harshly!” In this ecstatic passage, it is not difficult to see De Roller as an alter ego of Serra, who in Pacifiction returns to explore with determination, far from any sense of measure, the blurred border between narrative cinema and avant-garde exercise. Making use of his particular conception of film praxis –based on intuitive shooting with three digital cameras that never stop filming–, the director of The Death of Louis XIV composes his umpteenth ode to the splendor of decadence. In this case, the object of study is the twilight glow of colonial politics, a world stuck in its own putrefaction, an amoral universe in which the perverse and dying prints of Querelle (A Pact with the Devil) by RW Fassbinder resonate.
[Vicio y libertinaje de Albert Serra]
To give shape to the circus of hedonistic and indolent creatures of Pacifiction, Serra sharpens his sixth sense for the filming of banquets and cocktail parties in which, in the manner of Andy Warhol’s cinema, sophistication and sensuality come together with a certain air of decrepitude . An image of ‘Pacifiction’ To imagine the marathon stage shock treatment that the performers receive, it is worth paying attention to a numerical factor: the 165 minutes of Pacifiction are the result of 540 hours of filmed material. As the icing on the cake, in Pacifiction Serra wanders into the exotic settings of Polynesia and finds an inexhaustible source of prints that range between the monumental and the kitsch, from the imposing orange skies to the neon lights of nightclubs, from the wild ocean waves to the picturesque residences of the natives. Spaces and atmospheres on which a film is built that gathers the death rattles of neonoir – from Arthur Penn’s The Night Moves to Michael Mann’s Miami Vice – and contaminates them with David Lynch’s hypnotic estrangement. In the plethoric final half hour of Pacifiction, the brilliant French actor Marc Susini turns a French naval admiral into a dancing demiurge lunatic, halfway between the small ‘Man From Another Place’ from Twin Peaks and the demonic Dennis Hopper from blue velvet
[Albert Serra: “La historia del cine no me ha marcado como creador”]
And Pacifiction is dyed blue in a closure that walks towards delirium and abstraction, when the screen becomes a fireproof canvas in which Serra shapes a purgatory in which a troupe of monsters and a few noble souls (such as that of the enigmatic character played by Lluís Serrat, the Sancho Panza de Honor de cavalleria), coexist in the heart of darkness. Route through suspended time By Javier Yuste How to assess the career of a filmmaker as eccentric as Albert Serra? For himself there is no doubt about the place he occupies: “In Spanish cinema I am the best, the only one”, he told us before presenting Pacifiction in Cannes, a temple of auteur cinema that has pampered him since its inception. In fact, Serra’s films have generally been better received in France – which awarded him the prestigious Jean Vigo Award in 2016 – than in our cinematographic ecosystem, where the average viewer barely knows his name and public aid is elusive. . Perhaps that is why his latest creations are co-productions shot in French. With a degree in Theory of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Philology, Serra approached the seventh art with the idea of subverting a discipline that seemed to him “mere entertainment”. “The history of cinema has not marked me as a creator”, he has come to assure. Serra’s work is always halfway between the movie theater and the museum, close to the avant-garde of the 20th century, to the playful, to the absurd, to the poetic… For this reason, the same thing premieres a film starring a audiovisual exhibition at the Reina Sofía or at the Documenta in Kassel. In fact, his work opposes the traditional routines of cinema, which were born linked to the limitations of celluloid. Serra emerges in 2006 riding the new wave of digital technology, which widens the borders. Lower costs allow him to create from outside the industry, shooting long hours and finding the final narrative on the cutting room floor. From his first film, Honor de cavalleria (2006), in which he deconstructs the myth of Don Quixote until he reduces it to two lonely souls who walk, rest and have mundane conversations, to Pacifiction, Serra’s method has remained invariable. For his part, the center of gravity of his narrative could be defined as the agony of suspended time, ultimately leading the viewer to ecstasy through powerful digital images of him. A demystifying irony In El cant dels ocells (2008), his second film, without abandoning a demystifying irony, he approached the story of the Magi with the same lack of action, psychological depth and formal tricks. In Historia de mi muerte (2013), winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno, he did go further and in the impossible meeting of two myths of culture such as Casanova and Dracula, Serra enhanced the writing and theatricality of his non-actors to illustrate the blackout of the Age of Enlightenment. In The Death of Louis XIV (2016), with Jean-Pierre Léaud in the shoes of the monarch, Serra replaced wanderings through open spaces with a bed and a sick person to show the last days of the Sun King in the present tense. Subsequently, Liberté ( 2019) closed the journey through history and myths on a night of cruising in a forest in 18th-century France to propose an approach to desire and vice. In short, a film corpus unparalleled in our cinema. Follow the topics that interest you