As they move inexorably forward in time, Albert Serra’s films don’t crescendo so much as peter out. In Story of My Death, the harbinger on the horizon is the return of irrational, Romantic thinking in the late 18th century, which would effectively smother the enlightened libertinism that the story otherwise wallows in. And in The Death of Louis XIV, it’s the fate promised by the title, to which the film marched with solemn certitude. Serra’s latest, the audaciously perverse and amorphous Liberté, doesn’t give up its game so readily. Nearly without narrative conflict, the film homes in on a long night of sexual experimentation among a group of libertines hiding out from the French courts on the Prussian border in the late 17th century, and for much of Liberté’s duration, the only things generating forward momentum are the subtly escalating intensity of the acts themselves and the faint expectation, however ruthlessly exploited, that the sun will eventually rise again.
In adhering to the compressed timeline of a single dusk-to-dawn cycle—with the exception of an afternoon-set pre-credits sequence—Serra hasn’t accelerated his typical languorous tempo. If anything, Liberté finds the filmmaker so generously stretching the passage of time that the film might act as a sedative were it not for its salacious subject matter. If The Death of Louis XIV’s ellipses—each of which revealed the protagonist in a worse-off state than before—signaled early on that the film would be defined by an understated ticking-clock momentum, Liberté has no such temporal markers, and thus feels even closer to a state of purgatorial suspension. Once night falls, there’s little way of knowing, other than a glance at the runtime, if the film will be two hours or—in the spirit of Andy Warhol, whose surveillance art Serra seems indebted to here—the full duration of the evening. 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.
Of course, Liberté has been edited into the shape of a feature film, and given that the material existed first as a theatrical performance and later as a museum installation, it’s apparent that Serra has medium-specific reasons for doing so. Though betraying the markings of its original form in its small revolving ensemble, single location, and frequent tableau staging, Liberté conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that’s unique to the language of cinema. The most immediate testament to this pedigree is the film’s look, which perversely blends the compositional and lighting style of the Rococo period with the oft-unflattering sterility of digital photography. Some marriage of painting and cinema has always been central to Serra’s art, but the overall effect here has never seemed so uncanny, in large part due to the work of cinematographer Artur Tort. Much of the film is lit by a single source emulating moonlight that’s clearly too bright to resemble anything natural, washing as it does over the film’s nude bodies with a quality of the divine, separating the lighting here from the murkier illumination of Story of My Death or the matter-of-fact candlelight of The Death of Louis XIV.
Serra’s almost reverent attitude toward his bewigged libertines is evident from the film’s opening, which observes them at leisure just after the Duc du Wand (Baptiste Pinteaux) delivers a gentle entreaty to the visiting Duc du Walchen (Helmut Berger), a potentially sympathetic German, to permit and even participate in their games. The Duc du Walchen accepts the former proposal, if not the latter, but ends up spending the entire evening within a stone’s throw of flailing genitalia anyhow, all the while maintaining an expression of curiosity. Periodically revisited in reaction shot, his poker-faced countenance might have played like comic punctuation were it not for the fact that Serra’s entire ensemble cast—culled, with the exception of Berger and a few others, from the art world and a pool of non-professionals—wears practically the same expression even in the throes of passion. The overall effect of this homogenized emotional range is somewhere between deadpan irony and humbling contemplation, as it seems Serra finds something genuinely touching in the hesitant, imperfect pursuit of transgression that these figures consensually take part in.
Such an impression is tangible largely because the sex acts on display here are so primitive and tame by modern standards. This isn’t the dominion of Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast, where the screen is slathered with grotesqueries aimed at jolting the contemporaneous audience out of complacency. As Liberté progresses, Serra’s characters evolve only so far as to graduate from ass-slappings, light kissing, and spectated masturbation to fellatio, rimming, and straightforward penetration, and the most scandalous demonstration—a jug of milk poured over a woman as she hangs from a tree branch—would barely move the needle on the dark web. In wide shot, Serra leaves his characters semi-obscured by shadows and tree trunks, and at medium distance, he frames the proceedings in such a way that leaves the division of bodies and body parts unclear, mere flesh undulating in the moonlight. All of which is to say, the film’s mood is one of ripe sensuality rather than pornographic exploitation.
More impactful than any genital exposure, in fact, is the panoply of faces, each in their own way processing desire and uncertainty to varying degrees. Among others, there’s the tall libertine played by painter Francesc Daranas who doesn’t engage much in the film’s sadean pleasures himself but always seems to be comically scurrying through brush to find an optimal view of the goings-on; Serra regular Lluis Serrat as the portly Armin, who’s quick to come forward and unzip himself for any potential opportunity; Pinteaux as the introspective younger man who spends the evening trying to articulate his rarefied ideal of pleasure, which amounts to something more scatological and extreme than even his cohorts can abide; and Alexander García Düttmann as a man whose disfigured face makes it difficult to read his emotion but who’s nonetheless a keen accomplice in one of the film’s climactic orgies.
Only a handful of women (played by Theodora Marcadé, Safira Robens, Iliana Zabeth, and Laura Poulvet) enter this largely masculine zone over the course of the night, and in many cases exert sexual dominion over their flabby male counterparts. To the extent that there’s a narrative conflict in the film’s relatively freeform series of erotic adventures, it’s in the escalating assertiveness of Poulvet’s character as she hilariously demands more from her underperforming partner (“Any monkey could get harder than you!”). Indeed, part of Liberté’s weird poignancy comes from its depiction of a free-thinking oasis that’s gradually and inevitably undercut by power dynamics—most conspicuously embodied in the baroque carriages that dot the mise-en-scène and provide safe respite from the water sports taking place outside, or in some cases a claustrophobic option for a less public show of intimacy. It’s in one such shelter that the Duc du Walchen spends the majority of his time, quiet and vaguely judgmental, perhaps resigned to the notion that this behavior could never be assimilated into civilized society. Of course, we know this now to be untrue, and so Liberté’s accomplishment is in reminding us that the human quest for transgression, flawed and awkward as it may be, can be a productive force for enlightening the mind to alternate ways of living.
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