LIBERTÉ

Albert Serra
A forest at night somewhere in Europe, in an 18th century that looks like the end of times, becomes the theatre of experimental sexual encounters among libertines of some anonymous nobility. In the clearing, period costumes are used to reveal bodies that are mistreated, wild, loosened, caught in a series of protocols of some permanent and impossible pleasure. Between a waste ground used for cruising and a genuine film set, the real forest around them is filmed as if it were artificial, because everything is “unnatural”. Yet, the orgies in Freedom are above all a swansong, from a double historical standpoint: in the 18th century, when the film is set, it shows with a cold passion a certain pre-revolutionary “decadence”; in the 21st century, when the film is being made, it seems to foreshadow something like the end of sexuality, or the end of heterosexuality – but by pushing it at its height, by demonstrating it by contradiction. Now, Freedom becomes fascinating from the moment it makes us understand that its subject is not sex (that thing it isn’t really doing anyway), but power, which it focuses on and describes with the craziest precision, at the same time as it openly exercises it over its figures and its audience. It is what really makes it in-your-face, what really makes it beautiful. Freedom is Serra’s most political film, even though they all are. (L.C.)