Albert Serra | Liberté / 2019

the insatiables

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Serra (screenwriter and director) Liberté / 2019

 

This very unusual work of cinema by Spanish Catalan director Albert Serra focuses on a group of 18th century “libertines,” who as Guardian reviewer Peter Bradshaw puts it, represent “A group of (fictional) aristocrats, expelled from the court of Louis XVI, [who through their major spokesman, Comte de Tésis (Marc Susini)] approach a sympathetic German nobleman, the Duc de Walchen (played by Visconti veteran Helmut Berger, his last film) 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.”

     But Bradshaw misses the true nature of this film, which although it includes a great deal of homosexual and lesbian sex, and in its second half focuses of the Sadeian complete abandonment to sensual pleasure, focusing most particularly on a ground of beautiful women willingly pulled from a convent, is not all truly pornographic in the manner you might apply the hundreds of pornographic films produced since the 1920s. Serra’s film, is in fact highly aestheticized and, despite its depiction of various sexually depraved behavior it also reminds one, in its basic commentary of a far less brutal film than Pier Paulo Pasolini’s difficult Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) which presents with a descent of young school children guided into the worse excesses and true torture of Fascism and reminds me, in particular, of Guillaume Apollinaire’s S&M fictions written for wealthy supporters who helped him financially survive while writing some of the best of French poetry and art criticism. The work also calls up German playwright’s Peter Weiss’ highly popular 1964 play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade, also made into a movie (1966).     

     Serra’s film itself was based on a theater play he directed and a later art exhibition in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.

     Actually the first half of this film, where gradually the wealthy and privileged aristocracy are brought in the woods in Palanquins with four bearers each—most whom are also involved either willingly or forced in sexual participation—reads very much like a contemporary gay cruising parks where gay men fuck, suck, and stalk the wood in voyeuristic pleasure as in New York Central Park’s The Rambles, Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Park, Tel Aviv’s Independence Park (Gan Ha’atzmaut), or São Paulo’s Parque de Ibirapuera, and the numerous others in almost every city in the world. Here men with big cocks, beautiful Palanquin porters, and men of all sizes, shapes, and personalities get a chance to engage with other men. Two of the convent women play with lesbian sexuality. Given the gay world reality, there is nothing really shocking here. Just visualized sex, which, or course, is enough to scandalize many people across the world, particularly unschooled Americans. The very perceptive Letterboxd commentator Neil Bahadur observes: 

“It's the rare film that devotes itself almost entirely to giving itself time to breathe, and as a result becomes what's probably the apex of what Serra is trying to do with his cinema: free space and free time to think but also to immerse yourself, or rather both at once. This might make more sense later, but I recall not understanding Serra's Louis XIV film until discovering he was a big fan of Brian De Palma, and I realized that it was a film about the relationship between spectacle and subservience. Liberte takes this a very significant step farther, initially laying out its conceits at the very beginning linking the voyeuristic desire of these characters to watch these acts play out with the voyeurism of us as viewers ourselves watching the film and by extension, the same acts the characters watch and partake in. It takes off almost immediately where Louis XIV left off, but gradually transforms into something else entirely - Serra's moral indifference to the actually very tame onscreen acts quickly helps at least some of us realize the genuine pleasure the characters have in this situation, and by extension the sheer pleasure of voyeurism itself. Liberté is shameless, has no fear of embarrassment, and avoids sensationalism in favour of complete sensuality even to the most amusingly carnal acts (this film is also quite funny) and I'd stress the importance of this film existing and even being on the festival circuit in an otherwise embarrassingly timid, pithy and conservative culture.” 

     I don’t know if I might describe all these acts as “very tame,” particularly when the much more willing and cruel women, typified by Mademoiselle de Jensling (Iliana Zabeth) and Mademoiselle de Geldöbel (Laura Poulvet) began to force the men to engage the older aristocrats in all sorts of sexual behavior, begging the for extended floggings and endless fucks, the later actually destroying the film’s one assassinated figure who cannot get a sexual erection for her pleasures. The later pouring of a mix of milk and cum over the females, and the final pissing scenes are almost blessings of sustenance in the form of milk and water. We all know that urine is not a filthy production of the wastes, as Trump seemed to believe, but made up of 95% water.

     As in all such patriarchally controlled worlds, it is the women who most suffer, and most claim to desire it, as if the cruelty displayed to them was to be expected. But some of the older heterosexual men seem to expect that same thing for their sins, whatever they may be. Yet guilt is not the major factor in this film, and all the participants are willing and consensual beings—unlike Pasolini’s film—and all, including the enlisted porters, have come to the forest with curiosity and open sexual desire.

     Perhaps the most despicable figures in this film are the pure voyeurs, one the outsized porters who beats and punishes many of the heterosexual men and women, and who in a long-tubed binocular looks across the dark landscape to observe what is going all, even after most of the events that have already occurred and staring often directly ahead at the audience itself, voyeurs perhaps for simply watching this film with the attention it takes to finish it—it took me three full nights!

     The worst of the aristocrats are actually Comte de Tésis, Duc de Wand, and Comte Alexis Danshire (Alexander García Düttmann) who spend most of their time in the coaches, planning out evil events for the woman like dirty-minded locker boys, fortunately, almost all talk, very little of which come to be.

     The liberté that these night figures sought out, of course, had little to do with the French revolution notion of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). These individuals sought out a liberation that could never be truly satisfying given their constant demands that their sensual pleasure and desires would always include more and more without surcease. The ultimate pleasure for many of them, particularly, these demanding women was always “more,” a demand that led ultimately to self-flagellation and even crucifixion. The best that they might hope for, as represented when one voyeur opens up one of the coaches to see both man and woman having fallen into a total stupor in their attempts the satisfy their endless desires.

     Yet in a brilliant and important interview with the director by Manuel Yáñez Murillo in Film Comment.  

      Yáñez Murillo observes: “It interesting to read your films as the result of a very personal evolution, but with Liberté it’s also very clear that you’re responding to a contemporary climate of oppression, driven by political correction.”

      Serra responds: “Yes, definitely. In this sense, Liberté has several things to say. On the one hand, the movie presents sexual desire as a democratic force. In the sensual and sexual intercourses that take place in the film’s cruising area, social roles vanish in the hands of pleasure: the dominator can easily turn into submission, the master becomes the servant and vice versa. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, handsome or ugly, young or old, man or woman… The sexual game is played with a blatant arbitrariness. And from that democratic drive emerges the fusion or ambivalence between pleasure and pain, which was something much more common in the cinema of the 1970s. I consider psychological and moral ambivalence as one of the greatest conquests of Western civilization. Think of the Marquis de Sade, or the amount of great art created around the notions of injustice or abjection. In [the] recent last years, I’ve been increasingly obsessed with the certainty that it’s only through fiction that true empathy can emerge. The only actual way by which I can access your mind, your thoughts, is through fantasy. In this interview we’re just exchanging some rational thoughts that move around the surface of our minds. But through hypothesis and elucubrations fiction allows me to try to conquer your imagination and make visible what’s in your mind. I may fail to get in there, but it’s free to fail—it’s just fiction.

     As anyone in his senses, I’m in favor of a political agenda that could improve the lives of the underprivileged and the minorities, and that could establish a real gender equality, but it’s sad that political correctness can diminish the power of fiction. Because, in fact, psychological and moral ambivalence is essential to understand the contradictions and hypocrisies of our time, so very present in the tensions between private and public life. I’m thinking for example about all those left-wing politicians who have a private life structured around by very conservative, materialistic values. But to deny this real contradictions, and even more so, to try to remove these ambivalences from the realm of fiction is a great defeat.”

 

     And finally, critic Georgiana Musat, quite nicely summarizes my understanding of Serra’s series of sexual tableaux vivants. Writing in Eye For film she notes:

 

“When describing his films, Gaspar Noé referred to them as “movies out of blood, sperm, and tears” —if I may, Albert Serra’s films are made out of “blood, excrements, urine and sperm,” a combo that would chase away any conservative. In his Dalinian [influence, she suggests by the filmmaker artist, Salvador Dalí] irreverence, a place where angels would fart and laugh like little monsters, excrement is literally turned into gold.

     There’s no such thing as sobriety in his work, rather an incessant desire to tear down myths: Casanova, Louis XIV, Dracula, are all stripped down to their physical, bare necessities and seen as impotent, constipated, handicapped or terminally ill. Serra turns to period pieces not out of nostalgia, but quite the contrary, to provoke and dismantle - a grotesque imagery looking to alter the often sublime portrayal of such figures.

     Liberté (Liberty), his latest slow-cinema entry, the Special Jury Prize winner in the Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes, is a rococo cinematic composition between theatre and visual installation (Serra takes inspiration from his homonymous German play and his Spanish installation, Personalien). It follows a number of libertines (one of them is played by Helmut Berger) who, after eloping from court, seek sexual refuge in an unknown forest. The year is 1774, at the gates of the French Revolution—while oblivious to history’s natural course, hedonists will temporarily fantasise about spreading debauchery worldwide. In these chiaroscuro “poisonous woods,” as one character puts it, they no longer embody their social and political status, for no such thing is permitted on the altar of erotical indulgence: an indistinct mass of silent creatures, master and servant, appearing from bushes, hands on penis, cruising. In Liberty, anyone can perform, at any time, or just hide in their laced sedan chair, waiting for an ideal prey. It’s surprising that, in spite of its erotical charge, their full moon fornication binge has so little to do with intercourse at all: all these men are desperately trying to get aroused, but no excess or sexual deviation can lift their limp penises.”

    

     Morning arrives and suddenly in the slow sunrise all but one of the sedan chairs has disappeared. The woods returns to the world of its natural animals instead of the would-be human ones. The insatiables have disappeared, imagining another return some other dark night.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).