Cannes Review: Benoit Magimel In Albert Serra’s ‘Pacifiction’

Manori Ravindran International EditorCannes competition title “Pacifiction,” from “Liberté” director Albert Serra, has been acquired for the U.S. by specialty distributors Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films.Serra won the Un Certain Regard section’s Special Jury Prize in 2019 for “Liberté” and cracked the festival’s official selection this year with “Pacifiction.”The film is set on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, and centers on the High Commissioner of the Republic and French government official, whose role brings him to navigate both the high-end “establishment” and shady venues where he mingles with the locals.

s’il vous plaît!Over at the French film festival on the Cote d’Azur, which wraps up this weekend, it’s long been popular to give comical and undeserved standing ovations to just about anything that could be feasibly called a film. Next year the Claudes and Claudettes will be hopping to their feet for a dancing toad on TikTok (more deserving, honestly, than Lars von Trier.)The trade publications time these performative participation prizes like they’re Olympic runners.

When his mother spoke, Ernest remembers, everything sounded important. “I cling to her light,” he tells us in voiceover, an adult remembering how that felt. The Ernest he is recalling is just a little boy (Milan Doucansi), snuggled against Rose (Annabelle Lengronne, a wonderfully vivid presence), with his grave and clever older brother Jean (Sidy Fofana) sitting opposite on a train taking them from Cote d’Ivoire to a new French life.

Guy Lodge Film CriticIt was Paul Gauguin, France’s most celebrated Polynesian tourist, who once wrote of “learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.” It’s a void, he wrote, in which other senses and sensory awarenesses are heightened, amplifying his sense of loneliness and separation from others: “The inhabitants of the district and I mutually watched each other, and the distance remained the same.” Gauguin isn’t mentioned in “Pacifiction,” Albert Serra’s languorous, meandering tour of modern-day Tahiti, though those words echo through its survey of the island’s distanced, distracted residents — even if the nights here aren’t as silent as the artist might remember, disrupted as they are with tinny discotheque beats, darkened trysts and the hovering, unidentified threat of nuclear warfare. The first film by cultish Catalan provocateur Serra to crack Cannes’s competition lineup, “Pacifiction” is an unhurried, 164-minute tropical tour that is sort of about nothing and everything at once.

The stars of the new movie Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann, stepped out for a press conference and photo call at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

This year has produced several films if terrorist attacks in France. One Year and One Night by Isaki Lacuesta (which premiered in Berlin this year) and November by Cedric Jimenez which is being shown out of competition at Cannes, and Alice Winocour’s deeply personal Paris Memories (Revoir Paris) which was inspired by Winocour’s own brother who was in the midst of the November 2015 attacks at Bataclan. The film follows a woman’s journey to recovery after surviving a mass shooting. 

Directed by Louis Garrel, son of revered arthouse director Philippe, “The Innocent” is a quintessentially French comedy whose principle aim is to be a fun time. Though this may seem a relatively modest ambition, we all know it isn’t easy to do well, and Garrel certainly does not make things any simpler for himself as the film repeatedly leaves the realm of the bon mot to veer on the farcical.

“The Stars at Noon” finds the French filmmaker Claire Denis shooting in Panama doubling for Nicaragua; directing a cast of Yanks, Brits, and assorted Central Americans; and working from a script switching between Spanish and English. Internationally coproduced Towers of Babel such as this aren’t at all uncommon at the Cannes Film Festival, but the errors in translation all over this disappointing foreign-relations drama run deeper than simple differences of ethnicity or language.

Given the combustible subject matter and the director’s reputation, French auteur Claire Denis has made a remarkably listless and unpersuasive film in Stars at Noon. Set during the Nicaraguan Sandanista revolution circa 1984, this adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novel published two years later centers on a couple of Americans of dubious character who misspend time in Central America before finally deciding it’s time to split when, in fact, it might be too late. This is the sort of misfire that, just because it comes from a hallowed French auteur, sometimes gets programmed in the Cannes competition even when it manifestly doesn’t deserve to be there.

In the late 19th century, two French psychiatrists coined the term “folie à deux,” literally translated as madness for two, to describe what is now widely referred to as shared psychotic disorder, or when two — or more — people transmit delusional beliefs and occasional hallucinations to one another. The condition is most common in people closely related, who live in intimate proximity, and has been lengthily dissected by academics.

Based on her own time spent in the acting school Les Amandiers, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” aims to recreate a very specific time and place both in her life and in France, more than it cares to inform her audience about what, exactly, was so special about this school. Funded in the 1980s by Patrice Chéreau, a successful and daring director of theatre, opera and film, Les Amandiers did not last very long but for a few years it was considered to be one of the most exciting places in France and even Europe for young actors to develop their crafts, and for directors to find new talent.

Observed in isolation, detached from the body or in extreme close-ups, organs and other vital viscera resemble moist masses of soft tissue plucked from alien landscapes in the unflinchingly immersive medical documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica.” Alternating between footage from cameras inserted into patients for the purpose of treating ailments and grisly shots from the operating room, directors Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the team behind the striking non-fiction film on fishing “Leviathan,” apply their fascination for uncanny imagery with relativist intent to the inner workings of French hospitals and, in turn, the human body.

Director Léa Mysius expertly crafts a queer, witchy movie in her Directors’ Fortnite debut film, The Five Devils, which received a five-minute standing ovation at the screening I attended. Mysius takes concepts like identity, sexuality, and mysticism and creates an intricate genre film that’s part time travel, part drama, and all heart. 

“The Five Devils,” from French director Léa Mysius, captivates from its very first seconds. We see Adèle Exarchopoulos in a sparkling gymnast outfit with other similarly dressed girls, all watching an enormous fire in the background; when she turns around, she is crying — fire, beauty, passion and death all conveyed in one image.

Alessandra Ambrosio has been making the most of her time in Cannes. The Brazilian supermodel is a big fan of the film festival, enjoying its luxurious and elegant ambiance and the opportunity to wear bold and innovative looks. She shared some photos on her Instagram, stunning her followers.Brazilian model Alessandra Ambrosio & her most stunning Cannes looksBrazilian model Alessandra Ambrosio looks like a vision wearing a plunging dress in CannesA post shared by Alessandra Ambrosio (@alessandraambrosio)“Heure d’or,” she captioned the post, referring to the golden hour in display in the photographs.

Director Emily Atef’s Cannes Un Certain Regard drama More Than Ever is a careful, fastidious, Tradition of Quality film about impending death that’s easy to admire but won’t exactly pack ‘em in.

The challenges of street casting are explored in The Worst Ones (Les Pires), an Un Certain Regard drama about a film within a film. Directed by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, it sees a film crew hit a working class French town, with thought-provoking and sometimes darkly funny results.  
 Flemish director Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh) is casting kids in Picasso, in the suburbs of Boulogne-Sur-Mer. His feature is about a pregnant teen and her younger brother, and he wants authentic local residents. The neighbors are surprised that he’s only casting “les pires” — what they consider to be the worst ones, or the hoodlums. But there’s raw talent in Lily (Mallory Wanecque) and hot-headed little Ryan (Timéo Mahaut).

The films of French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux are at their best when they combine his penchant for ludicrous but simple what-if scenarios, with his perceptive eye for humor in everyday life and banal interactions. He would probably hate his cinema to be pinned down in this way: though he has proven that he can subscribe to straightforward storytelling with “Deerskin” (which premieres at Cannes in 2019) and “Incredible But True” (Berlinale 2022), the French director and absurdist also enjoys leaving the demands of logical plot developments behind in favor of a freer style.