Although they do not form a diptych, The death of Louis XIV (2016) and Peace. Torment on the Islands seem to echo each other. In the first, as its title suggests, we witnessed the last hours of the Sun King, interpreted by the imperial Jean-Pierre Léaud; in the second, it is about the metaphorical death of a French ambassador established in Tahiti, embodied with royal grace Benoît Magimel, crowned best actor at the last evening of the Césars. Remember that the latter had played a young Louis XIV in The king dances (2000), by Gerard Corbiau.
Like The death of Louis XIV, this new feature film by Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra demands the patience of an angel from the spectator, since this long and slow spellbinding journey to which he invites him sometimes takes on the appearance of an interminable night of insomnia. Camped largely in the sultry Tahitian nights, where sweaty bodies lurking in the shade of a nightclub or lush vegetation spy on each other, when not under the blazing sun , this political drama as atmospheric as it is contemplative follows the patient quest of the High Commissioner of the Republic De Roller (Magimel).
Believing to reign over this heavenly corner of French Polynesia, De Roller, still dressed in a cream suit evoking the French colonial uniform, his gaze veiled by bluish glasses, thus establishing a distance with the people he claims to be interested in, has only one thing in mind: to find out if the rumors of new nuclear tests are true. Through his remarks on culture and politics, which he distributes generously when no one has asked his opinion, he perceives a virulent but not devoid of humor criticism of colonialism.
Each time he speaks to his discreet local collaborators, including the sublime and bewitching Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau), to diplomats, including the Portuguese (Alexandre Melo), or to expatriates, such as Morton (Sergi López), De Roller shows smugness and feigned deference. However, his interlocutors are sometimes mute, sometimes evasive. The more time goes by, the more De Roller fears that the Admiral (Marc Susini, who played Louis XIV’s first valet Blouin) will carry out his mission after 20 years of hiatus.
Radical, singular, Albert Serra creates magnificent twilight and nocturnal tableaux, where the heady serenade of insects and the rustling of the wind in the leaves struggle to supplant the monotonous industrial music of a bare-breasted DJ. He also crunches the solar beauty of the landscapes until he is more thirsty and carefully composes a languid atmosphere with deleterious scents. The problem is that it multiplies the scenes bringing absolutely nothing to the narrative.
In the last part of the film, where we plunge into the full waking nightmare, thus evoking the anguish experienced in the lair of the terrifying Kurtz ofApocalypse Now, by Coppola, he stretches the sequence shots to the point of complacency, threatening to make the spectator lose the thread of the story or to tire him completely of the stakes, at the risk of abandoning the hero to his fate by quickly leaving the room before the end credits. Sometimes there is a thin line between hypnotic and soporific.