Review: Liberte

Image courtesy of The Cinema Guild.

It's somewhat of a surprise that Albert Serra's squalid new film "Liberte" doesn't end with someone shouting "the aristocrats!" In the case of this particular picture, it would have made sense on multiple levels. While Serra's intentionally torpid earlier features - the much better "Story of My Death" and "The Death of Louis XIV" - managed to entrance despite their slugging pacing, his latest feels punishingly so, especially considering the fact that it's a two-hour-plus chronicle of degenerate behavior.

The film displays the exploits of a group of exiled - you guessed it - aristocrats who have been banished from the court of Louis XVI, and take to the woods for an evening of behavior that could best be described as a libidinous theater of cruelty. As the film opens, one of them tells a carriage carrying several others of how he witnessed a horrific public execution in which a person was pulled apart by four horses, but also with the assistance of several men with knives who had to cut away some of the limbs. The aristocrat then goes on to mention the group's "vision," which requires some "defending."

Although the photography in "Liberte" - which has less to do with liberty than libertines - is often lush, it merely serves as a backdrop for sequences that are fairly ugly. Serra might have been inspired here by Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious "Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom" - another film about a group of fascist aristocratic types celebrating their final days in power by torturing the young and attractive - but his vision is lacking the inspiration displayed in that film.

While "Salo," with its blunt and cold approach, is an often masterful vision of horror, "Liberte" is merely a plodding bore featuring some partially clothed French actors engaging in all manner of grotesque behavior, much of which I do not intend to describe here, although it includes numerous bodily fluids, an amputated arm and some ridiculously over-the-top sequences of characters talking dirty to one another.

The political implications of the picture seem too easy, whereas the concept of a moviegoer being little more than a voyeur could be of a little more substance - that is, if it seemed remotely possible that anyone would want to spy on this group of people and the activities in which they engage.

Although the film features its own share of voyeurs - characters lurk in the woods, watching the others take part in their follies - what's displayed in "Liberte" is unquestionably unpleasing to the eye. Serra often displays visual mastery in his works - but this time, there's little reward for one's patience. Rarely has debauchery been such an icky snooze.