The still countryside and faint chirping of birds and insects that forms the backdrop of Albert Serra’s Liberté are instantly undermined by a nobleman’s monologue about the heinous torture and execution of the would-be assassin of Louis XV. Describing in detail the punishment meted out for attempted regicide, the aristocrat recalls his simultaneous disgust and fascination, as well as the people-watching he did as a spectator gazing out on the crowds of poor and rich alike who showed up to watch a garish bloodletting. But if the man speaks of distaste for the event, his voice conveys a complete lack of passion as he regales his companions; if anything, his tone suggests open curiosity. His interest in the base and vulgar befits the man’s status as a libertine who is traveling with a group of like-minded aristocrats from France to Prussia in search of a royal court that will tolerate their libidinous ways.
What follows is a sedate variation of the sort of depravity that Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted in his adaptation of libertine maestro Marquis de Sade’s Sálo. Night falls over the party as they camp out for an orgy away from the prying eyes of civilization, and in the dark, people constantly form new pairs and groups to engage in various sex acts interspersed with conversations that elaborate upon intense fantasies with the same detached calm as debates on the nature of Libertinage. The whole thing becomes an intellectual exercise, albeit a hollow one built around the self-gratification of European society’s most powerful castes.
Therein lies the film’s great joke. Men and women alike share an almost mechanical approach to their Dionysian pursuits: there is frequent talk, and even images, of such extremes as whipping and urophagia. Among other things, men are lashed until raw, a woman is suspended from a tree and doused in milk, and a syphilitic amputee with a half-rotten nose has his stump prodded with a pitchfork. Yet the actual sex is consistently stiff and awkward, far more mechanical and conservative than the outlandish eroticism that surrounds it. Flaccid penises are more common than erect ones. Indeed, one of the film’s most memorable recurring images is of a nobleman walking around with a strap-on of equine proportions, a giant, flopping tube that he strokes and rubs others with as if real.
This isn’t the first time that Serra has tackled this relative period of history. His previous film, The Death of Louis XIV, studied the slow spectacle of the death of an absolute monarch. With plunging shadows and elegantly lit fabrics, Serra beautifully framed a film that nonetheless conveyed the hygienic conditions of the time so keenly that animated stink lines practically emanated from sweat-soaked bedclothes and filled chamber pots. Here, that sense of Smell-O-Vision is amplified even further as one considers the bodily fluids caked on the flesh of these debased people who are visibly unwashed and sporting filthy clothes. The contrast of the film’s elegant uses of natural and artificial light and its reeking figures engaging in bestial acts of self-pleasure doubles down on Serra’s blend of the baroque and the cuttingly realistic, creating a work as beautiful as it is mercilessly critical.
Serra, one of the great modern stylists of “slow cinema,” certainly tests one’s patience here. Devoting more than two hours to nobles shagging in the woods gets old fast, but Serra uses the length to consistently undermine the libertines’ self-image. As can be seen from the dullness of the actual sex, the libertine focus on ever more extreme forms of erotic play is less a sign of enlightenment than of repression of the system to which they not only belong but are highly placed. The characters feel like people without a country due to banishments from court, yet only because of their wealth and position are they able to pursue this kind of sexual primitivism as a way of life. Liberté is Serra’s hardest film to watch, but it may be his most caustically funny yet.
Liberté (official trailer) from Cinema Guild on Vimeo.
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