Liberté (2019) If you go down to the woods today… (Review)

There’s an image late on in Albert Serra’s Liberté which seems to contain something of the film in its entirety. A woman is walking through the woods, the scene of an orgy held by decadent aristocrats exiled from the court of France’s last king Louis XVI. She is in period costume, yet the fabric on the bottom half of her dress has disappeared somewhere along her journey, leaving only the enormous, unwieldy wicker framework that shaped those enormous dresses. This feels like a summary of Serra’s approach to the French costume drama genre, stripping away the layers of artifice and design to show you the real humans beneath. It also feels characteristic because it reveals she isn’t wearing underwear.

Aptly, this is Second Run’s second run at the work of Albert Serra, having previously released Story of My Death in 2015. I left that film with the feeling that Serra was clearly doing something interesting, but I wasn’t ready to come on board yet. Like Pedro Costa, he was using modern digital film-making techniques to create stories that simply couldn’t be told on film: shot in very low light, built up out of hundreds of hours of improvisation. It was both laudably inventive and alienating. The intervening years have made Serra’s sensibility easier to understand. Costa, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul (another possible point of comparison), is a deeply local film-maker, delving deep into the marginalised communities of his home country. Serra, by contrast, is a wanderer. He’s worked in several different countries, which is hardly a unique situation for a modern art-house director, but it poses particular problems for his type of cinema. Yorgos Lanthimos’s awkward absurdism feels as pleasingly off-kilter in England as it does Greece, but Serra is aiming to capture moments, to get the full, immersive feel of a time and a place. How do you do that successfully in a foreign country?

Serra frequently manages this by using famous historical or literary figures as an entry point for the audience. His debut, Honour of the Knights, was a radical take on the Don Quixote story, his previous feature The Death of Louis XIV requires no explanation, and Story of My Death pitted Casanova against Dracula. If that last one sounds more like the set-up for a 1970s exploitation movie than an austere art-house piece, hold that thought: Liberté begins with a reading from Casanova’s memoirs and wastes no time in evoking the French aristocracy’s greatest gift to the grind-house, the Marquis de Sade. Barring Pasolini’s devastating Salo, most films about the Marquis have evoked him as an icon of sexual and literary liberation, which doesn’t quite get to the heart of his contradictions. It is very easy to condemn the authorities for censoring de Sade’s books, but how do we come to terms with his kidnapping of underage girls, or his assaults on servants and peasants? As the recent scandal over the paedophile memoirist Gabriel Matzneff shows, the French intellectual classes are always ready to cut a rapist some slack if he can write; if it wasn’t for his books, de Sade would be seen as the kind of aristocrat who necessitated the invention of the guillotine.

As a Spanish director working in France, Serra revels in re-opening controversies that date back to the birth of the Republic. The title of his film invokes one of the three values – Liberté, égalité, fraternité – that modern France was founded on, but his characters never let the word pass their lips. Instead, they define themselves as libertines, and the difference is more than three extra letters can contain. A country founded on the notion of liberty would presumably hold the deprivation of another’s liberty as a grave crime, but libertines have no such restrictions. Like de Sade, they follow their own individual pleasures even when it is at the expense of others, and the long dialogue scene that begins the film sees them plotting a spree of torture, bestiality and murder.

It’s a relief that the most extreme acts discussed never happen, but it also encourages a satirical reading of the film that might not be clear without this prologue. Before watching Liberté I wondered if Serra was trying to revive the turn-of-the-Millennium New French Extremity scene, in which directors like Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé and Bertrand Bonello made erect penises into something approaching a visual cliche of contemporary French cinema. I’m not sure Serra is the kind of director to indulge in overt parody, but it did strike me as funny that erections are the one thing you won’t be seeing in Liberté – not because Serra is shy about frontal nudity, but because his aristocratic libertines can’t, to put it crudely, get it up. In this context, the scenes of urination in the film’s second half come across less as a fetish and more as a sad parody of the orgasms everyone was expecting.

By the time a review starts talking about aristocratic urolagnia, you’ve probably decided whether or not the film is for you or not. For those still on the fence, there are some well-considered extras, most of which sensibly revolve around interviews with Serra. Eloquent, in-depth and drily witty, he proves an excellent guide to the hidden layers of a film whose initial shock value might be hard to get past. Even without the explicit sex, Serra is not a director for everyone; his films are usually long (Liberté is 133 minutes, which is still far from his ceiling) and very committed to staying in one particular mood. Those who were frustrated by the focus on vibe over plot in Steve McQueen’s recent, 70-minute Lovers Rock will have very little fun with Liberté.

Well, I adored Lovers Rock, and Liberté has took me a few more steps down the path to where Serra’s head is. Compared to Story of My Death, the longeurs are easier to accept as part of the overall point, and the upgrade to Blu-Ray – Story of My Death was DVD-only – makes it easier to appreciate Serra’s murky, night-time digital images. This makes a difference, not just because of what you can see but because of what you now know you can’t. In his interview with Manu Yáñez-Murillo in the inlay booklet, Serra estimates that as much as 30% of the shots include digitally composited imagery, usually to teasingly block the audience’s view of something. The early shots, too, are often constructed around something off-camera, some kind of negative space, something leading the characters into deeper, darker territory. It would be easy to dismiss Liberté by paraphrasing that infamous bad review of Waiting for Godot – this time, nothing happens disgustingly – but there is a weight of ideas behind even its quietest moments, and this set is a fine primer on what those ideas are.

Thank you for reading Graham’s Review of Liberté

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