166 min | NR | February 17, 2023 | Grasshopper Film
A French high commissioner drifts through Tahiti in a white linen suit, smiling at everyone and trusting no one. Rumors spread that France is about to resume nuclear testing in the Pacific. He keeps talking, keeps charming, keeps learning nothing.
De Roller is the French high commissioner to French Polynesia. He moves through Tahiti shaking hands, attending nightclubs, and managing the locals with a politician’s bottomless geniality. A rumor surfaces that France will resume nuclear testing in the Pacific. A submarine may be lurking offshore. The film is not about whether the rumor is true. It is about a man whose entire job is to control a situation he cannot see, and how power feels when it has detached from any actual ability to act.
Benoît Magimel plays De Roller as a creature of perpetual performance. He wears a white suit and tinted glasses and never stops talking, and the talk is a kind of fog he generates to obscure his own helplessness. Magimel lets the charm curdle into menace and then back into charm within a single conversation. Pahoa Mahagafanau plays Shannah, a local woman who attends De Roller, and her stillness exposes how much effort his ease requires. Marc Susini plays L’amiral, the admiral whose presence at the nightclub suggests the military machinery grinding behind the diplomatic theater. Sergi López appears as Morton, one more figure in a chain of men who know more than De Roller does.
Albert Serra directs from a script he wrote with Baptiste Pinteaux, and he shoots the tropics as a place of poisoned beauty. The cinematography saturates every sunset and ocean surface until the color itself feels diseased. Serra filmed with multiple cameras running simultaneously and let the actors improvise inside long takes, which gives the dialogue an unrehearsed drift that never resolves into plot. The sound design layers ocean swell and nightclub bass into a constant low dread. The compositions hold for so long that paranoia stops being a theme and becomes the texture of watching itself.
This is a film about colonial power in its decadent phase, when the machinery still runs but no one at the controls understands the machine. De Roller wants to protect a place he is helping to ruin and cannot admit either fact to himself. Serra refuses the thriller’s promise of revelation because revelation would imply the system can be understood and stopped. The dread never pays off because the dread is the point. The empire keeps smiling and the water keeps glowing and nothing gets answered.