by Chris Feil
Cineastes missing human touch might find an antidote in Albert Serra’s Liberté, another gallery-ready period piece from the Catalan filmmaker. The film is a barrage of increasingly queasy, bewigged kinky fumblings in the woods with the director audaciously exploring the repetitive nature of lust.
Set just prior to the French Revolution, Liberté opaquely follows a set of libertines who have been banished from the king’s court. Opening on the fringes of a forrest at dusk, the voice of one of them describes the public torture and dismemberment of a prisoner in brutal detail. The story goes beyond the biologically possible, the telling centering as much on the violence as the response from those who witness it. “The crowd enjoyed the show,” he muses, “and you know, I have a taste for these things.” As this grotesque story preambles for the audience, the film's extremity is as much about voyeurism to the act as the act itself.
What follows is a long series of sexual vignettes, the libertines cruising one another between cramped trysts in horseless carriages and spread out among the forrest clearing. Serra works between voyeurism and exhibitionism, with the brood shown doing as much spying on eachother as they do participating, until our watching creates the suggestion that we are participants. The display slowly morphs from hedonism towards humiliation, languorously throttling towards outlandishness that refuses interpretation on any literal terms. Characters engage in jaw-aching with nary a nap, going from stark naked to corseted (not to mention drenched to dry) with absurd speed. “Open the gates to hell!” one man demands into a derriere, but damnation never comes.
This alarming expressionism is met with intoxicating aesthetics that lull the film into a trance-like state. Serra employs a florid soundscape against a metered shot structure, disorienting the audience between sight sound, and creating a hyperawareness of everything lurking in the frame. Shot in sumptuous moonlight by Artur Tort, the film is a visual stunner, casting the performers in shadows that lure us in like a devil ready to pounce. Liberté would probably fall apart without such beauty in its arsenal - to keep us watching, the film needs to be this gorgeously enigmatic.
Serra places the incendiary at odds with an intensifying mundanity, as if our desensitization to their ceaseless sexual appetites reflects a more political agenda. What are the libertines seeking if not constant gratification of their own impulses (and under the guise of a righteous ideology)? And what are we if not helpless to watch until it no longer shocks us anymore?
Serra achieves something fascinating through repetition, though the film is by design more compelling to think about than to experience - but the film is ultimately limited by its ingrained pretension. As the libertines and their conquests clutch at further extremes of euphoric pain and pleasure, Serra drones so far past our patience’s tipping point that watching Liberté is like feeling the time-space continuum collapse. He might want us to feel like we have always been here watching this sexual one-upmanship. And dissociating further into the dawn.
Grade: ABDCF!?* (but we'll just say B)
Liberté begins on VOD today through Film at Lincoln Center, with additional arthouse streaming locations to be added in the coming weeks!