spacetime coordinates: today on a small island in French Polynesia
Director: Albert Serra
Definitely of my favorite movies seen lately. While incredibly aesthetically pleasing, this poster of a movie – perfect sunsets, perfect waves, and palm trees waving in the end and traditional Polynesian dances, you name it! On the other hand it is a complete window to today’s containerized world, because you it starts with the unmanned – almost automatic container ports that are the conduits of capitalism on the high seas. Call it a “polycrisis” movie, call it “multipolar”, call it a “great power” struggle, or a brutal euphemism like 19th c the Great Game (watch the docu we’ve been covering over here), but paint it like the sky in this movie. Whatever one calls it – it has the Indo-Pacific at its center and DOLBY surround background.
Prove me wrong but this incredibly moving, funny and mysterious movie has some of the air of John le Carré’s stories and anti Bond ethos. It’s spooks somehow lost it or are slowly careening towards the deep end. The age of empires is not over and decolonization was never complete, nor was the role of sûreté- eclipsed after 1989. Spooks and imperial powers got busy and honed their skills while trying to stop and unveil imagined and real plots by anti imperialist exiles, unlikely nationalists and ll who were considered the scum of the earth. Unfortunately France is still mired in such situations. There are still a lot of territories that are a combination of sovereignty and depedence. There’s also the fact that all small nations (like Vanuatu) gave a vote in UN and both China and US are courting them.
IIn France’s case, such territorial dependencies and strategic positions have been renamed as an “overseas collectivity” to keep the bon ton (an attempt to dodge its semi-colonial anachronism? or still court French investments?). For some watching this movie, it may come as a surprise that France has more or less kept 121 atolls and islands (including Tahiti) under the label of French Polynesia. Europe not only fortified its borders and has employed both Lybian Coast Guard in order to intercept and surveill economic refugees and migrants or use Israeli drones to patrol its seas, it has also kept an interest in its ex-colonial “pacificitions”.
Pacifiction is the attempt of the Haute Commissaire (high commissioner played by a completely convincing Benoit Magimel) of the Republic of France in French Polynesia to wade new waters and avoid further atomic experiments and French military deployments in the region. He has got a lot on his hands, although I do not want to whitewash his position – a power broker in an unstable world, trying to protect the islanders, be a patron of thr arts and stay abreast of the mad power struggles happening all around. Trying to make sense of this movie is an impossible task because even its characters are lost – trying to piece together or anticipate what is going on.
The movie is build around a series of superb scenes. Landscapes and locations are not backdrops. This could range from loungy sleazy – paradisiac-hellish places – like clubs that ooze atmosphere and bizarre lassitude, violence or erotic charge all at once to the cheap but effective camp black light tiki aesthetics. These scenes are of tremendous beauty, but this beauty feels completely tinted (tainted?), made-up. The movie does not try to de-exoticize the “island Paradise” but brings all the various impending disasters to bear on it. Even the navy submarine is a complete ghost – we watch the swaggering but increasingly dumbfounded High Commissioners employing locals in order to spy on his government’s geostrategic move or the hidden will of its military establishment. Empty hotels, former investments, and abandoned resorts became the place of intrigue and cloak and dagger.
He watches what are presumedly sex workers that embark on a flimsy boat and go into the ocean who knows where to meet who knows who. Everything is only remotely seen, full of innuendos, and not really mediated by GPS or modern surveillance technologies. It’s all hearsay, some working lights, air strip being repaired. The commissioner can only enlist the locals, the shady club owners, or the local seductive & ambitious call girls such as Shannah (here played by a fabulous trans actress Pahoa Mahagafanau) in order to find out what an alcoholic mad French Admiral’s plans are (another highlight role). The supposed US interests are represented by very dubious guys, almost a complete caricature of CIA operatives – looking both unimpressive malicious in their weasel-ishness.
Everything seems a bit obsolete, because the notion of a New Cold War seems obsolete, and a sort of bankruptcy of the political imaginary. The atomic scare is not something overrated or just a part of post-atomic preparedness scenarios of the 1980s. Since the US saber-rattling with China and the several alarms at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station during the Russian aggression on Ukraine, atomic fears are resurgence. Pharmacies all over Europe have been seen a ruge of iodine pills demands since Putin ordered the nuclear deterrence forces on high alert. This whole Great Game for the Indo-Pacific is quite unreal- quite fictitious since it takes place among such paradisiac, spectacular, insular surroundings.
Some form of Military Keynsianism is at play all over the planet. NATO plays wargames and the EU sky seems to have became part of permanent war games. But before all of this – there where the French nuclear weapons tests in Moruroa between 1966 – 1996 causing international outcry (number of tests was between 175 and 181 respectively). Atomic energy has some revival in the age of climate emergency, yet it is inter-linked with military objectives and hard to avoid pollution. Pacifiction mentions the very real cancerous outcomes suffered by the local population as well as the long term ecological disasters of these military experiments. So the fallout of the Cold War kept raining. So the fears of the fictive white-dressed Haute Commissaire seem very real.
The exotica music plays an important part in the movie – and while there is not much violence and all the fears seem rather remote, there is a constant dark undertone from the club scenes to the paranoia of the Admiral to the hard-partying of the sailors. There is a feeling that all these highly ritualized happenings are all going to go terribly wrong. This fiction also becomes increasingly endearing as we follow the lonely figure of the administrative representative on his errands and realizing his authority is a very fragile. While everything is ridiculous, all the piecing together is done from the bushes on the beaches. The High Commissioner does his night-time search using help from his surfer friends. I loved how the boredom of the insular life is portrayed, or how the taxation issue is fluttered about concerning the casinos and the question of morals is settled with the church. All these are entirely fictional but also part of a sort of impossible-to-disentangle Pacific fictional machine. That being said – my point in making this movie a canvas of the so-called polycrisis (the overlap or rapid succession of different and distinct crisis – including aging former Empires and aging officials) is about stupefaction, about a conflation of various separate things and a sense of fuzzy target less search.
TimeSpace Warps 