At times, critics’ own words may fail them. In trying to find a proper description for “Liberté,” the new film from the provocative and occasionally (but not in this case!) sublime Catalan director Albert Serra, the words that most often sprang to mind were from Mel Brooks. That is, the hunchbacked hangman’s line from “Blazing Saddles”: “This one is a doozy.”
Serra makes beautifully shot, methodically (to say the least) paced films, often of a historical nature, and sometimes fancifully so. His 2014 “The Story of My Death” could have been titled “Casanova Meets Dracula.” Here, some aristocratic pre-Revolution French pleasure-seekers drop in by a wood presumably near the manor of Duc De Walchen (played by Helmut Berger), and speak of “a vision” they are “defending.”
At least that’s how Duke de Wand (Baptiste Pinteaux) — a figure whose particularly Gallic pomposity is almost funny — puts it. One is not quite sure whether he means a vision of a social order or of the evening of bucolic debauchery that follows, or both.
After sundown, breasts are fondled, genitals rubbed, backsides are whipped with switches, milk is poured over a naked body. Urine makes a late-in-the-picture appearance. Grisly violence is enacted on an amputated limb. All the participating personages are serious and stern, and the pleasure they purport to seek is not easy. What’s mostly depicted is strain. Penises are generally flaccid. “Get out, you’re useless,” spits one dominant woman.
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.
Liberté
Not rated. In French, German and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes. Watch on Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
