Perform a literal language conversion from Spanish to English on the following user-provided text. Do not translate any content enclosed between and tags, keep those tags and their content exactly as-is: Pacifiction

Albert Serra has just given us a wonderful and radically contemporary film about political power. After being interested in the hidden implicits of crudeness and perversion in the enlightened society immediately prior to the French Revolution (Liberté), now the filmmaker from Banyoles has acted accordingly by writing an essay on degradation and absurdity in societies inheriting the 18th-century social contract (in operatic-Mozartian terms, the first film was his Don Giovanni and this beautiful Pacifiction configures a very particular kind of Così fan tutte). If before he invited us to spy on an aristocracy saying goodbye to its privileges by taking refuge in the safe conduct of sexual imagination, here we encounter an apathetic community that no longer has the spirit even to plot carnal fantasies and can only cling to the nostalgia of a hierarchy of soulless high officials.

This is how Serra weaves a film with more plot substance than usual, centered on a representative of the French state in Polynesia who sees his idyll with the dying crumbs of his citizenry totter (his almost organic communion with the peace of a still idyllic natural environment also fractures) due to rumors of an immediate resumption of maritime nuclear tests. It is normal that Albert has reconciled with the world of actors and has not sent Benoît Magimel to Guantánamo, an interpreter of colossal science who outlines with overwhelming hyperrealism the embodiment of this antiquated chieftain who tries to maintain the fiction of the leader and of the public in a delirious environment where the rulers limp from drunkenness and fall over themselves to degrade themselves among prostitutes and deformities. This is an island of corpses clinging to the past knowing that they have already lost all the glory they will ever live.

The filmmaker's approach to his own gamble is made from irony, and Serra plays for the first time at pretending to disguise himself as a conventional narrator in a story that includes clichés such as tropical exoticism, detective adventures, or even the thriller. But all of this is nonsense to make the viewer believe they are in a comfort zone, relax them, and then hit them with a good string of blows, since, ultimately, Pacifiction is interesting not only because it anticipates a contemporary world where all leaders will be emaciated clowns, aspiring culture-vulture flâneurs, or military men with Homeric rhetoric and proletarian crotches, but because it starkly shows the future of a society in which even minorities and the awkward will fight to the death for survival and where the most dangerous people in each neighborhood will be those who seem most innocent. As expected, this island is Catalonia.

In fact, if there is a revolutionary touch in this new film (and one that contrasts with Albert's previous creations) it is humor, catharsis and an insurmountable symbol of intelligence to filter the tensions of this future society –or present, what the hell– of small men eager to save their greatness. Last Thursday, the day of the unofficial premiere of the film at the Filmo, I was surprised that during the almost three hours of footage none of the spectators present dared to laugh almost even once, when I was laughing my head off (which certifies, on the other hand, that Catalans have lost their sense of humor, one of our most ancestral qualities). Only laughter, in short, can serve to survive in this hodgepodge of awkward egos without references that hide in the submarine of their own bewilderment. Pleasure is no longer useful; only derision remains.

All this I tell you is woven into a creation of an almost painful physicality: the film forces us to experience the twilight of the gods in almost real time, with images that seek the zero degree of the director's involvement but from where, precisely because of this fact, a tremendous passionate impulse emerges. Albert has shot us unreservedly into the darkness right around the corner and has turned the cliché of this fictional peace in which we survive on its head to remind us that we are in permanent war. Faced with a new, beautiful work of art, the only thing the journalist can do is thank him.