THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE
On December 5, 1766, Louis Antoine de Bougainville left Nantes aboard the frigate The Sulky for a first French world tour. In 1771, the work drawn from this journey, Trip around the world, particularly touches consciences for the two pages that the author devotes to Tahiti, where he landed in April 1668. This “New Kythera” seems to him an earthly Eden, and the tolerant and aphrodisiac mores of its inhabitants inspire him with a painting that increases the myth ofu “good savage”. Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, evil spirits, will make good use of it to better denounce the corrupting power of our civilization.
Nearly three centuries later, it is the turn of Albert Serra, the most resolutely Baroque of Spanish filmmakers, to land in this territory, which has become French Polynesia. The landscape, meanwhile, has darkened. Admiral Abel Aubert du Petit-Thouars, Paul Gauguin and Mururoa have been there. Either the violence of the colonial influence, the voluptuous distress of paradise lost, the criminal cynicism of nuclear tests (about 200 between 1966 and 1996, being the subject since 2018 of a complaint of crime against humanity before the Criminal Court international). It is precisely under these auspices that Serra – end amateur of ending empires (Honor of Cavalry, The Death of Louis XIV…) – signs his most insolent and majestic film.
In its center, a white suit matching the latest model diplomatic Mercedes with red plates, but still blue glasses, orange sneakers, patterned shirts, owner casualness, sulky pout: we have appointed the High Commissioner of the French Republic De Roller. Benoît Magimel, lost, never better, embodies it. The Serra method – we shoot all the time, with three cameras, we drown the fish of the plot, we write snippets of dialogue to be widely stuffed or crimped, we do not know when it starts or when it stops – product , in contact with this actor who came from all other spheres, sparks. All around, the postcard decor lends itself to drifting. Between the blaze of the skies and the shimmering turquoise of the sea, the prefectural M. Homais exudes in the Flaubertian sequence picturesque views and a power that is crumbling.
Constant voltage
Also, the film is located there, like the character, between the most extreme tension and the most lascivious abandonment. In the first of these chapters, the game with the genre, which itself supports a rather vague relationship to the plot: political thriller, spy film, call it what you will. Imagine Joseph Conrad taking over the screenplay ofOSS 117. The main reason is that an insistent rumor mentions the possible resumption of atomic tests by the French State. Farcesque a year ago, the subject regains a sudden vigor on the Poutinian horizon. It disturbs at the very least the smooth stay of De Roller, who has to enter into negotiations with separatists who are a little nervous on the question, even downright aggressive, especially since they seem to be under the covert management of an omnipresent American. , whose bird-like face and angular muteness don’t speak well to anyone.
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