All of Serra's films feature an actor in various roles that seems to form an extremely bizarre thread between his films. Lluís Serrat. From "Liberte" I went back in time to observe it better and now, "Pacifiction" confirms my own thesis. Lluís Serrat is the "Witness". He is the silent observer sent by Serra in each film as his own alter ego. The "witness" just needs to find out in order to be able to continue the thread of Serra's cinematic bizarreness. He speaks little to nothing but always looks around, often tilting his head as if he has an obstacle in front of his eyes, or maybe because he wants to see the same moment from another angle. Lluís Serrat is in himself a likeable, even bucolic apparition of an annoying neutrality. He doesn't seem to change anything, he doesn't get involved in anything and when he should (like in Pacifiction) he falls asleep near the car driver. Like almost all of Serra's films, Pacifiction takes its time. The narrative is (only apparently) monotonous, with long moments of silence (as in Liberte). And if Liberte was set in a night setting, in a tangled forest, in Pacifiction Serra proposes a completely different setting, an exuberant one (Tahiti) meant to mislead. The theme of the film is colonialism brought up at one point by the main character played excellently by Benoît Magimel. Again shocking (in a positive way) is Serra's ability to use non-actors (or quasi-unknown actors?) such as the transvestite Shannah. What I love about Serra is how he consistently refuses to force any kind of fracture in the flow of the action. It seems that from the first frame he leaves the filming studios and only calls Lluís Serrat on the phone from time to time to ask him how things are going. And if he is silent, then it means that everything is ok. Excellent film, 9.
Review of Pacifiction
