Dressed in a white suit and with a smile like a gangster, preventing crime has become De Roller’s way of life. As a high commissioner on the island of Tahiti, he navigates between the highest political social echelons and the lowest classes with a relaxed ease and excellent diplomatic skills. Making the wrong decisions, De Roller feels a physical, acute attraction to his status by night, a feeling that by day is washed away by the hypocrisy of local bureaucracy and a sense of mistreatment that has accumulated over centuries. 

Following Liberté (2019), a hedonistic sexual experiment with the aristocrats driven out of Louis XVI’s court, with this film Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra casts his characters, their alienation, and colonial past out into the clear blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. Hailed as the most French non-French director at the Cannes Film Festival, this representative of radical cinema calls his style morally aimless (and the LSD-soaked plot of political intrigue affirms this). The audience will come to their own conclusions. And so will the humour of the white bathing suits. Painter Paul Gauguin, French Polynesia’s “best-known tourist”, once said that you have to “[learn] to know the silence of a Tahitian night”. Serra stretches this drifting, hallucinogenic silence and slowly snaps it in half.