Liberté, the latest from Catalan director Albert Serra, begins in 1774 with the Duc de Wand (Baptiste Pinteaux) recounting how he witnessed a criminal being publicly drawn and quartered. That anecdote is followed by another bewigged Frenchman ordering two comrades, in a wooded area, to fashion a “balm made of shit and dirt,” which will soon be used on one of their female companions, who will also have urine deposited into her backside while other men ejaculate into her mouth. “Her body will be the shrine of our world,” this superior states. Shortly thereafter, the Duc de Wand expresses to a female companion his own bestiality fantasy, and when she responds by saying that she’d participate by fondling the animal’s genitals, he chides her for her banal lack of daring.
In case you couldn’t tell by now, this is definitely not your new family-friendly quarantine viewing option.
It is, however, clearly the work of the 44-year-old Serra, who in the aftermath of 2013’s Story of My Death and 2016’s The Death of Louis XIV (as well as that effort’s 2019 art-installation-ish companion piece, Roi Soleil), once again focuses on the pasty-faced aristocracy of 18th century France. As with The Death of Louis XIV, it’s a hermetically sealed affair about a group of interconnected upper-crusters engaged in the common cause of tending to the human body. Yet whereas that prior work fixated on royal handlers’ formalized attempts to treat their country’s dying patriarch, this saga (now playing online in partnership with Film at Lincoln Center, with a national rollout to follow on May 8) focuses on a group of uninhibited libertines determined to reject any and all sense of propriety. They’re anarchists who’d be right at home in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious 1975 classic Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and though Serra certainly looks upon, and stages, their taboo-breaking with a droll sense of humor, there’s plenty of grim transgression to be found here.
There’s little traditional story to Liberté, whose basic premise concerns the Duc de Wand and his fellow hedonists, who’ve been exiled from the French court for their abnormal conduct and now seek support and refuge from Germany’s Duc de Walchen (Helmut Berger). He’s not overly willing to provide it, but that doesn’t deter these libertines from carrying on with their evening bacchanalian festival in an anonymous forest. Those hoping for an immediate explosion of sensual delights, however, will be sorely disappointed. As is his wont, Serra’s film is a slow-burn affair that features neither music (save for its final minutes) nor much camera movement (with a few minor exceptions). The pace is languid and still, set to the sounds of incessantly chirping insects and the moans of its characters, whose faces become familiar but who have been fashioned with a deliberate lack of distinctiveness—which is to say, you’ll recognize them but have no idea who they actually are.
Furthering the anonymity of its subjects is Serra’s decision to cast everything in moonlit darkness. Eyes and limbs are spied amidst trees, bushes and other foliage, thereby teasing identity in the same way that the film teases pornographic fireworks. For long early stretches, Liberté involves disconnected sights of men and women either talking about their base urges, or standing around in the pitch-black woods. The occasional randomly lurid act breaks up the monotony—say, the whipping of a female bottom, or a tied-up woman being drenched in milk and rubbed with a dildo. But the proceedings’ torpor and obscurity is part of Serra’s plan, and suggests an underlying critique of the behavior on display, and the satisfaction that comes from such pleasurable-and-painful self-indulgence.
Serra’s initial withholding of the very X-rated material his premise, and dialogue, promises is his mischievous means of stoking our imaginations, just as it is for his characters. This taunting is also part of the film’s dry comedic sensibility, which extends to its portrait of these libertines as performers engaged in an elaborately explicit play designed for themselves, and each other. Key to their erotic transgressions is the existence of witnesses, and peeping toms abound in this darkly enchanted forest, watching every dirty deed carried out by their perverted compatriots. Serra’s fascination with voyeurism extends to Liberté’s audience as well, which he makes a complicit participant in this madness—and, thus, another potential object of his critique about what it means to be excited, and satisfied, by insanity of this sort.
The thing about Liberté, though, is that it’s anything but titillating, especially as it devolves into outright filthy sadomasochism.
A gentleman sticking his tongue into a woman’s spreadeagled behind while crying “Open the gates to hell!” Another individual with apparent burn-related facial injuries (so that his nose resembles a snout) receiving a golden shower from a woman squatting over his chest and a man standing above him. A mutilated arm being poked and prodded with a giant fork. These types of sights eventually become the norm, along with many protracted glimpses of flaccid and erect male members being rubbed and fondled by their owners and others. The effect is increasingly monotonous, if alleviated by the beauty of Serra and cinematographer Artur Tort’s oblique compositions; their use of light and shadow lends their imagery a painterly quality that’s playfully at odds with the sordid action they’re so strikingly depicting.
Given that Serra is one of Slow Cinema’s most prominent voices, it’s no surprise that Liberté demands a significant amount of patience and attention. His disinterest in momentum or dramatic conflict—even the murder of a prominent character barely registers as more than a meaningless footnote—means that his latest is far from mainstream accessible; one can envision multiplex viewers gazing upon it with a mixture of horror, confusion and boredom. Yet those who attune themselves to its bizarre wavelength will find it to be a formally rapturous snapshot of pre-modern obscenity, in all its gory, grotesque and hopelessly-awkward unpleasantness. It’s the Marquis de Sade reconfigured as a deadpan joke, shining a damning light—ultimately, quite literally—on the dissolute and their search for freedom through crazed carnality.
