It's just the end of the world. De Roller is a French official in Tahiti whose duties include wearing a white jacket and espadrills on his barefoot, riding a luxury Mercedes, drinking cocktails at a nightclub, flirting with local girls and catching a wave on a jet ski. But when an admiral arrives on the island, who drinks a lot, but smiles a little, and a few more suspicious personalities, the responsible official somehow loses peace, and increasingly looks at something through binoculars, peering at the ocean surface.
The work of Albert Serra, casually juggling religious themes ("Bird Song") in his films and defecating on Casanova's night pot, on the eve of his encounter with Dracula ("The Story of My Death"), Cervantes' free-narration ("Knightly Honor") and a libertarian orgy in the woods ("Freedom"), does not fit well into the pre-prepared classifications and conventional schemes of modern cinema - there is nothing necessary for him except devotion to slow cinema and Luis Serrat. Therefore, the Catalan is not suitable for the role of the idol of fans of superhero bats or blue-skinned tribes from other planets, rather, if you remember Muzil, for the role of an acrobat demonstrating dangerous new jumps to the connoisseurs sitting in the stalls in a semi-dark circus, still closed to the audience.
His new film is a two-act three-hour canvas, at first drowning in the Pacific serenity and bliss, endless, optional dialogues, a filtered magenta of Polynesian sunsets, the azure surface of the ocean, and closer to the end filled with darkness, rain, frustration and confusion under the pulsating dark ambient – cinema, fortunately, does not need final analysis. It may well pass for a film about death, but not about a piece, individually mandatory for each person the end of life, already, by the way, became the object of research by the director ("The Story of My Death", "The Death of Louis XIV), but about the all-embracing end of the world, the catabasy of humanity, played in the masters of nature - the truth without the birds falling dead from the sky, and Kirsten Dunst, how vain floating along the river in a wedding dress. Or for a film about the inglorious, paranoid decline of neo-colonialism in the face of another, useless Zama (Benoit Majimel, here unexpectedly to the place) – also quite so.
But even with all the caricature of the negative characters, it seems that “Torment on the Islands” is a picture, first of all, of the intimacy, latent and parallel existence of the universal evil, which is not seen through binoculars, but which is inevitable, as the gradually increasing muffled continuous fraction of the drum; the evil that once and suddenly, fatally reveals itself precisely on a clear, quiet, sunny day, not portending troubles – as inevitably and unexpectedly as a severed human ear, found in a neatably submerged continuous drum from a facade, changes your life forever. A film about Pacifiction, an imaginary fiction of peace and tranquility that may one day dissipate as much as the fog over Polynesia.