Liberté (Serra, 2019): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
This film is part of an Albert Serra season and will include a Q&A with the director.
Little White Lies review:
Describing a film that, from the outset, doesn’t appear to be a
comedy, as a comedy, is a method sometimes used by critics as a form of
deflection. Comedy tends to be primal and instinctual, maybe even a bit
throwaway, and so to use it as a descriptor in this way serves to
eliminate both a film’s complexities and your own need to take that film
at its purported face value. To give an example, in 1997, at a screening of William Friedkin’s The
Exorcist, most of the patrons chose to laugh their way through some of
the film’s most gruelling sequences, using comedy as a way to offset the
potential for trauma. Albert Serra’s Liberté was widely lambasted when it screened at the
2019 Cannes Film Festival for its extended duration and lack of a
storyline, as it presented a fleshy coterie of bewigged 18th-century
French dandies skulking around a moonlit woodland clearing while
engaging in all manner of erotic tomfoolery. Having been ejected from
the court of King Louis XVI for their foul predilections, this
clandestine collective decide instead to enact their own private
revolution – just ahead of the one on the horizon that resulted in the
king’s sudden head loss via guillotine. About an hour in, it seems clear that Serra is joking with his
audience, placing us in the uncomfortable position of being unwilling
voyeurs (among others on screen with frilly blousons and handy
telescopes) to these miniature episodes of unbridled libertinism. But
then maybe it’s not so uncomfortable, as isn’t this what film watching
is all about? That is, being asked to observe people from a safe
distance while they synthesise and offload naked emotions for the
camera. Is all cinemagoing not just tacit participation in a scrubland
orgy? If you think about it, that’s pretty funny. There’s a sequence in
which one nobleman is being repeatedly caned on his derriere while
another man watches excitedly, and it goes on for so long that you pass
through the looking glass of pure horror and into the realms of
absurdist comedy. Each scream translates as an equal fusion of pleasure
and pain. But which side to fall on? Liberté is not a comedy that evokes belly laughter, but one that
elicits coiled amusement at the idea of the microdramas that arise from
such a situation. Serra managed a similar tonal balancing act in his
previous film, The Death of Louis XIV,
in which it was hard not to titter as fussbudget retainers attempt to
prolong the life of a desiccating regent played with deadpan aplomb by
Jean-Pierre Léaud. Here though, roles are enforced, couplings are
suggested and then suddenly reneged upon, complete sexual equality
appears to be the rules of the game, though clear class structures
remain. It’s a fascinating, unique and affirmative film about the
revolutionary act of self-expression, and the connection between
backroom intellectual inquiry and broad public thinking. Serra and DoP
Artur Tort film the vignettes in a manner which negates any eroticism,
as they are instead interested in the logistics, the process and the
unspoken transactions that are made between these consenting adults.
It’s a film which could arouse outrage, or boredom, or even a strange
kind of mirth, and as such it feels as if Serra may have ended up making
one of the seminal midnight movies.
David Jenkins
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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