![]() Strangely despectacularized, languid, and somewhat sombre in tone, Liberté sees Serra at the height of his powers, boldly enacting his artistic freedom and continuing to make radical and subversive work in an increasingly conservative cultural milieu.” While some of the sex is graphic, the film's focus is on the interplay between exhibitionism and voyeurism, the seen and the unseen, lust and tedium, as cinematographer Artur Tort masterfully captures the carnal proceedings in images that recall the great neoclassical and rococo tableaux of Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher. “Mixing non-professional performers, theatre actors, and even members of his crew (as well as the great Helmut Berger, terrifically bewigged as the legendary German seducer and non-conformist the Duc de Walchen), Serra adopts a Warholian approach to the Sadean activities, allowing his players to extemporize some of their BDSM. (.) The film’s desolate and self-involved sex practice is clearly evoking Pasolini’s Salò (1975), yet it still skirts greater explicitness.” While the premise of the film is theoretical and abstract, what follows throughout this chilled out viewing experience is very simple: immersing us in indolent atmosphere of fetid sexuality, evoked through Serra’s typically beautiful and unique quality of digital photography, here mottled in dark shadows and the knubbily textures of foliage and 18th century embroidery. Its affinity for all these media is immediately clear: taking place on the cusp of the French Revolution in an isolated European forest upon which night rapidly falls, we watch various tableaux of aristocrats and their servants effectively cruising for sexual stimulation or voyeurism in a languorous, story-free procession of isolated actions inside sedan chairs and out in nature. ![]() “ Liberté emerges out of both Serra's two-screen installation, Personalien, (2019, 45') at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, as well as his eponymous 2018 play staged at the Volksbühne Berlin. What begins as an evening of strategizing on the proliferation of libertinage, descends into a Sadean night of pansexual one-upmanship. ![]() ![]() ![]() Just before the French Revolution, in a forest outside Berlin, a band of libertines expelled from the court of Louis XVI rendezvous with the legendary German seducer and freethinker, the Duc de Walchen (Helmut Berger), to convince him to join in their mission: the rejection of authority and all moral boundaries. ![]()
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