Critics reviews

This film is an ordeal that I never want to go through again, but it’s undoubtedly executed with a cerebral conviction and uncompromising seriousness that no Anglo Saxon film-maker could approach.

Serra’s use of lighting, framing, pacing, and composition of confined spaces, influenced by classic French paintings from François Boucher and others, turns Liberté’s porn-movie premise into a quietly brilliant work of absurdist staging.

The “point”, too, is concisely encapsulated by the title: Liberté is an ever-spinning carousel of attempted liberation, from corporeal, emotional, political, sexual, mental strictures, a simultaneous emancipation from body and mind in a pure effort to “open the gates of Hell.”

Serra’s blend of elegant visuals and provocative subject matter reaches his apex with a lush, haunting movie almost exclusively comprised of wall-to-wall orgies in the woods, and it’s almost certainly the most explicit drama about the 18th century ever made.

Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — “Liberté” plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.

Even if Liberté ultimately represents a failure of imagination, it may be worth engaging with—or submitting to—all the same.

This impotence is, in fact, the brilliance of Serra’s patient, frustrating, and frustrated new work, which, more than Sade or Salò, recalls the bawdy tableaux vivants of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s other masterwork, the Trilogy of Life, which possesses a macabre joie de vivre also at the heart of Liberté’s slow-burn political project.

It’s at this level that Liberté operates most productively: not as some revolutionary depiction of sex, but as a means of recognizing a mutual need shared by our neighbors, ourselves, and the people onscreen.

Serra’s overriding impulse in Liberté is to bask in the atmospheric peculiarities of his fantasized scenario, a drive that places the film in closer proximity to an immersive museum exhibition than to narrative cinema.

The scenes in which fantasy is called on directly—one in which it is disappointed, one in which it is satisfied—both occur in language, and as such drag the film away from its openness into an unsatisfying literalness. And that these fantasies, one that involves bestiality and the other scatophagia, are left in language further points to its odd prudishness.

Especially in the context of Cannes and contemporary film culture, where so much seems dutiful and obligatory, Liberté more than lives up to its title, suggesting that a truly free cinema is one that still believes in the possibility of subversion.

At a certain point, all this languor and the constant repetition of similar actions and similar gazes stopped giving me new things to see or think about, and for a while I was entranced in a vaguely hypnotic way by the oneiric and timeless atmosphere, the nocturnal soundscape, the odd, almost pathetic lack of energy in these sexual dilettantes. But this too wore itself out.