The debauchery of a bunch of bewigged 18th-century libertines is presented with cerebral seriousness, but it’s an ordeal to watch
Albert Serra’s Liberté, or Liberty, is a gruesome midsummer night’s dream of Sadeian horror in which a bunch of verbose bewigged libertines in the 18th century gather in a dark forest in their carriages for some prototypical dogging. (The men are allowed to be old and ugly, the women not.) It is some years before the French Revolution, centuries before Viagra. This film is an ordeal that I never want to go through again, but it’s undoubtedly executed with a cerebral conviction and uncompromising seriousness that no Anglo Saxon film-maker could approach.
A group of (fictional) aristocrats, expelled from the court of Louis XVI, approach a sympathetic German nobleman, the Duc de Walchen (played by Visconti veteran Helmut Berger) for help; with his guidance they assemble one moonlit night in a forest for some uninhibited debauchery – and only that quaint word will do. Like joyless vampires, they murmur to each other their jaded, detached appreciation for the spectacles of flogging and bondage that take place in front of them, and periodically participate.