Pacifiction

Serras thriller is visually exuberant as it is subtle and minimalist in terms of plot. Making good on its lead motto that 'politics is like a nightclub', for almost three hours the viewer sees barely more than Benoît Magimel in his role as bon vivant politician De Moller philandering around the island of French Polynesia, lending an ear to its manifold inhabitants, drinking, feasting, and preaching about his limited administrative role in the grand order of things, interrupted only by stunning episodes of visual allegories on geopolitics. Yet, I found watching De Moller in his ambiguous social interactions infinitely charming and astonishingly engrossing. On its allegorical level I found this movie truly mesmerizing - and I am not easily mesmerized. It is a gloomy thriller about nuclear balance of power, about ants in a battle of elephants, but only behind the curtain and only the abstract. It will therefore appear slow and uneventful to the ones who are looking for some concrete down-to-earth action.

Great contemplative film that carries something from Apocalypse Now without apocalypse (unless it's the ghostly presence of Marlon Brando playing tricks on me) and Below the Volcano. A port, a nightclub, the sea, sailors, dancers, receptions - all elements linked by Benoît Magimel. It's a poisonous film whose motives (a submarine, a rumour, political and social relations, violence, colonization, etc.) initiated do not give any tension to the film (it's not a thriller as it has been written), the film is on the contrary a sort of stable state, stirred by waves. The photography is sublime. A magnificent film.

I was bored today and decided to look up the most recent Cesar Award nominees and winners. That's how I ended up with this "motion picture" and I decided to go ahead to see it because I WRONGLY thought i would be thrilled for the 2hrs45mins but Alas!, tis was not to be.

It should have been made into a documentary enlightening viewers of the French nuclear tests that were conducted in Mururoa and the physical and environmental consequences that followed. Rather than making this a feature length film and putting us through this travesty. My rating is this high only because of the scenery.

It felt like a bad April fools day prank.

Hype has blinded me again, folks... I love slow burn thrillers like The Day of The Jackal, where the actions are shown in the movie step by step, but without losing its suspense and intrigue. I knew that Pacifiction would be slow... but not THAT slow!

This was a huge dissapointment, almost 3 hours of nothing. Serra is nothing more than a pretentious and a egomaniac director, and this movie shows that.

Pure boredom, there wasn't a mystery or even a bit of suspense to keep watching this thing... nothing.

The visuals are the reason why I gave this film a 5/10. Too good for a waste of film this is.

The visuals were so good... that led me to watch this atrocity to good cinema.

God... I'm so angry right now. This is the kind of trash that makes people go watch Marvel instead, the same stupid movie everyday instead of searching for something new and original. Because of the fear of finding a pretentious and boring film like this.

There are some serious qualities there. First of all, who doesn't want a trip to Tahiti?? There are "beautiful shots", as they say: waves, skies, nature, Benoît Magimel pensive on the beach, sometimes on an absolutely magnificent music score. It's a film that can be just admired as is.

It's also a film that can be used to admire Magimel, to hear him speak, wavering, a little mushy, always on the verge of tripping over his feet... It's quite fascinating.

But his performance is not enough to compensate for a slow mise-en-scene by default, rigid, flat, desperately sterile. It is the disease of a certain European-Asian festival cinema which under-cuts its mise-en-scene out of ease and habit. Despite everything, there are some exciting ideas here and there, never to be forgotten, a woman framed in a certain way for no particular reason, that's something but that's not much.

And then what do Magimel and the others really have to say anyway? The story is of very questionable interest. He is a high commissioner of the French Republic who navigates between local councilors against a backdrop of rumours of a resumption of nuclear tests in the region... I've heard of more exciting stories.