A review of Albert Serra’s political thriller, Pacification
September 2022 marked the return of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for its 47th edition. From September 8–18, stars descended on Toronto to celebrate Canadian and international filmmaking. For cinephiles, TIFF provides an opportunity to view both much-anticipated and lesser-known films before they are scheduled for wide release. This year, I had the pleasure of watching Albert Serra’s entrancing epic, Pacification.
TIFF describes Pacification as ”an elliptical political thriller set in the languid island landscapes of French Polynesia, [starring] the extraordinary Benoît Magimel as its shifty French High Commissioner. A grand, mesmerizing epic, Albert Serra’s most ambitious film yet unfurls with novelistic verve.”
The arthouse is an unlikely forum for geopolitics, but Serra cunningly redefines the cutting edge of European cinema into an experimental new discourse analysis. Alongside Claire Denis’ White Material, Pacification sets a high watermark for 20th-century-set political cinema.
Ostensibly a “political thriller,” Pacification is not The Manchurian Candidate. Pacification exists on the fringes of politics and the thriller genre. However, Pacification’s distance from genre convention in no way limits Serra’s ability to thrill or craft political intrigue.
While Denis and Serra are both deeply invested in the fallout of French colonialism, Pacification exceeds the scope of White Material by exploring the geopolitical implications of the French colonial and nuclear project.
An elliptical and challenging viewing experience, Pacification displays a stylistic and substantive nuance that both demands and commands the audience’s attention. The film’s uneasy tone and hypnotic atmosphere cast a spell of hazy intrigue, inviting viewers to read between the lines of political double-talk. Serra plays his game with remarkable lucidity, where nothing is as it seems, and the stakes are cataclysmically high.
Pacification nestles nuclear anxiety and Great Power machinations deep within its pensive narrative and hypnotic visuals. Interrogative without lapsing into didacticism, Pacification is one of Serra’s most fully realized projects to date.
Editor’s Note: Dominique Wightman is the Chair of the Law Film Society.
