Liberté

Release Date: September 28, 2019 (US Premiere – New York Film Festival)
Runtime: 132 minutes
Rating: If the ‘X’ rating still existed….
Studio: Cinema Guild
Director: Albert Serra
Cast: Helmut Berger; Marc Susini; Iliana Zabeth; Laura Poulvet; Baptiste Pinteaux; Theodora Marcadé; Lluís Serrat

**Reviewed at the 57th New York Film Festival – September 29, 2019**

During a Q&A session with director Albert Serra following a recent screening of his new movie, Liberté, at the New York Film Festival, the director said that it was his intention, in part, to create a film that encouraged confusion and disorientation. With that in mind, boy does he ever succeed! Does that professional intention, however, make it a good movie? God no!! It is, as the French say, le dreck!

Based upon a play that (having not seen it, I can only assume) should never have been produced in the first place, Liberté presents us with a rather mundane scenario: a cadre of 18th-century Libertines, having been expelled from Louis XVI’s court just prior to the French Revolution, take their debauched party to the woods bordering Prussia. For the next two hours and twelve minutes (!), the group of about 10 men and 3 women (I guess, though the number of people is made deliberately vague) cruise the woods seeking to indulge their depraved fantasies. And indulge they do! And depraved they are! Without going into too much detail (I already showered once today), it is with reasonable confidence that I can say that Liberté will receive a hard NC-17 upon its eventual release.

Don’t be fooled, however. There is nothing titillating or even truly provocative here. The events of the film occur during the course of one night, accompanied by a sparse score, and scant, filthy dialogue. It is an endurance test for the audience to keep their attention…for two hours and twelve minutes! As it gets later and darker, the group’s hijinks escalate in explicitness, resulting in some truly stupendous and lengthy displays of carnality that serve little narrative purpose, but exist mainly to disrupt the audience. In fact, if the many walkouts during my screening are any indication, Serra succeeded on this front as well. I mean, perhaps it would be necessary to briefly, even explicitly, present a woman (did I mention that the women are postulates from a nearby convent?) receiving a flogging from one of the aristocrats. Perhaps Serra wanted to affect a statement about the subjugation that women have historically received at the hands of powerful men. Perhaps he would be interested in making a pronouncement about a woman’s secret perversion to be humiliated by a more powerful man. But do we really need a full ten minutes (or so) of witnessing this disgusting man brutally flogging this woman as she screams for more? Is Serra hoping the audience will be entertained or aroused? If so, what kind of audience has he made this thing for?

The minimalist setting of the darkness of the woods and the sole use of ambient sound, such as the soft breaking of twigs as people maneuver through the woods or crickets chirping, do indeed disquiet the viewer. We are never quite sure who is flogging who or who is riding….you get the point. Sometimes a character will be seen staring lasciviously from behind a tree at a copulating couple, and in the next shot, he or she is placed in one of the few carriages docked throughout the area. But this is no Gaspar Noé movie, wherein the confusion and disorientation is part of the genetics of the story, used to enhance the disconcertedness that the characters (and by osmosis, the audience) are feeling. Since there is no compelling story in Liberté, the obfuscation the director strives for simply winds up as frustrating. While I personally consider the film art-house porn, I concede that Serra has clearly made exactly the movie he wanted to make and has succeeded on his own terms.