Liberté (Albert Serra, 2019) (Patreon)

This will, alas, have to be a tentative evaluation, since the screener I watched was unusually substandard, and the film in question is one of particular delicacy in terms of light and shadow. In fact, I strongly suspect this may be Serra's very finest work to date, although to be certain, it would be necessary to see it as clearly as possible.

Having said all that, certain things about Liberté are abundantly evident. Following from Serra's previous films, such as Story of My Death, The Death of Louis XIV and Roi Soleil, the new work goes even further in a particular direction that Serra has been exploring for quite some time. He is a filmmaker who treats the concept of the "period piece" as a problem of signification rather than a stylistic given. It's not just something one can simply "do" with cinema. Serra's employment of period signifiers is always calling on a double-knowledge, one that works adamantly against the suspension of disbelief. We are always expected to recognize that we are watching a contemporary spectacle, the filmed document of a kind of dress-up event. As such, Serra's construction of 1774 in Liberté is a modern activity, the recorded residue of a critical process with regard to creating a meaningful historical pageant.

All period pieces do this, of course, but not all films foreground this element as insistently as Serra's do. They don't do this by the now-conventional Brechtian means of "breaking out" of the historical diegesis. Rather, Serra accomplishes this by working with non-professional members of a troupe whose very presence onscreen indicates a particular working method. When we see Lluis Serrat, for example, it is not unlike seeing Ninetto Davoli in Pasolini's films. It is more than a human logotype; it is the film's bond with the audience that we are, once again, observing a particular artist working through his own concerns, apart from any apparent desire to conjure a palpable 18th century. The bond is tribal, and the effect is a bit like hypothetical Scooby-Doo time travel: "The Albert Serra Gang Meets the Sun King," etc.

Adapted from a stage work, Liberté is one of Serra's most conceptually forward efforts. Situated on a literal frontier (between France and Prussia), the action takes place in a dense forest over what appears to be a single night. The film is encased in a thicket of darkness, with small pockets of negative space allowing for micro-points of light. Although Serra often seems to consider himself a breed apart in terms of contemporary filmmakers, it's difficult not to detect a bit of Apichatpong influence at work here, as figures almost imperceptibly emerge from and recede into the wooded tangle.

But if Fassbinder has been a primary touchstone for Serra's work in the past, it's important not to forget the equal importance of Andy Warhol's cinema for understanding what he's up to. This is, in many respects, Serra's most Warholian film -- many wide tableaux with fixed camera positions providing viewpoints on various forms of either un- or barely-simulated sexual acts, performed and presented impassively, with an almost clinical matter of factness. Calling on Warhol means one gets Jack Smith in the bargain, and several shots, whether intentionally or not, mirror the orgiastic visual mode of Flaming Creatures, wherein flesh is on display but the boundaries between bodies are virtually impossible to discern.

Liberté is a film about libertine outlaws, and some critics have complained that the film is (a) boring; (b) not sexy; or (c) both boring and unsexy. One of the major misconceptions about Serra's film seems to be that he thinks that by incorporating water sports or flagelation, he might "shock" the contemporary viewer. But this is silly. Why would he want to do that? This is a film about the power of perversion, a power which we have, to a large extent, sacrificed in exchange for social justice. In one key scene, one of the Dukes is preparing to eat out a Duchess's ass. "Open up the Gates of Hell!" he beckons. This seems preposterous, given that you can now go to WikiHow and receive graphic tips on the best way to eat ass. 

But what Liberté actually shows, at points like these, is that there was a moment when perversion -- the idea of transgressing "against nature" -- was real, and was far more thrilling than any act in and of itself. In the interest of accommodating more and more sexual behavior under the sign of cultural normalcy, we have lost the automatic thrill of such grand transgression. This is all to the good, since it means that those people who have been associated with those acts are entitled to full subjecthood within liberal democracy. And of course, we can always retrieve that sense of the forbidden within our imaginations. But what Serra is showing us -- the exploration of libertinism as an almost rational pursuit of deviance -- is lost, in the same way that we can't just unlearn heliocentrism or relativity.

So displaying these acts as an almost static tableau is a way to underscore our distance from them, not so much the acts themselves, but the radical meanings that may have once had. Serra is offering us a picture of the pursuit of absolute freedom as a kind of Natural Science Museum exhibit, a literal twilight of the (smashed) idols. In the center of the scene, always, is the Duke's ornate conveyance, practically a Louis XIV chamber in miniature, smack dab in the middle of the forest. It is an object of the culture they are trying to leave behind but cannot fully abandon. Sex acts take place inside, outside, through, and against it. It is a physical tether to the spaces whence they emanate but to which they cannot accommodate themselves. In a way, its centrality is a talisman of their ultimate failure.

Serra concludes Liberté with a slow, gradual sunrise, as if the perversion of the preceding film had to somehow give way to a cleansing aubade. This betrays Liberté's theatrical origins -- the lights slowly coming up -- but also speaks to the impossibility of truly living a radical philosophy. The libertines were ultimately condemned to be creatures of the shadows. Even today, there is still a struggle between acceptance of gay life vs. non-heteronormative queer behavior, which some believe should be kept out of the light for fear of jeopardizing tenuous social gains. Serra's title, alas, is ironic. The concept of freedom makes no sense outside the context of sublimation and oppression. We have met the cops at Pride, and they are us.