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).

Nadav Mishali | אישך, תשוקתך (Longing) / 2014

no voice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nadav Mishali (screenwriter and director) / אישך, תשוקתך (Longing) / 2014 [20 minutes]

 

In the orthodox marriage of Michal (Meytal Gal) and Meir (Tomer Lev Tov), she an obedient Jewish wife, which means her subservience to her husband, and he is a devout yeshiva student.

     Every month, with the help of her mother-in-law, the beautiful Michal immerses herself, as part of the religious ritual in the tradition Mikveh bath, prepared and purified to again have sex with her husband. Yet nothing happens. She is left alone, and she is frightened by the fact and more importantly, is left longing with sexual desire.

     The rabbi has recently asked Meir to be the spiritual advisor to several students, an important new responsibility which means more time with some of the yeshiva boys. He is pleased by his new position.

      While cleaning out the pockets of his clothing in order to wash them, she discovers a condom in one of his pockets. When she shares this information, her mother-in-law (Rita Shukrun) asks her what she did; the explains she put it back, the mother-in-law praises her decision, quoting Moses and arguing that prayer is the best solution.

       It is truly a world where women’s voices have no meaning, partly because they themselves, given the Orthodox laws, refuse to speak up. The older woman argues that “our strengths are in our mouths,” not because they speak out, because the whisper silent prayers to God. In fact, the woman are given “no voice,” despite their endless prayer and isolation. “It is doesn’t hurt to turn a blind eye to some things,” the elderly woman argues.

       The irony of her comments are apparent, but as pointed as the pain of silence which now Michal must daily suffer, as from the kitchen, always, ironing, cleaning, cooking, she begins to perceive in her brief views of the other room where her husband is “advising” one of his male pupils (Yehuda Nahari Halevi) she sees them obviously touching one another and putting their heads close together as in a kiss.

      In the bed soon after, she again attempts to sexually approach her husband, but he, kissing her on the forehead, turns away, as she must do equally, having been refused yet again.

       The film’s synopsis declares that when “Michal finds out her husband is having an affair with a man, her world collapses, and she is forced to deal with sexual rejection from Meir, as well as social rejections from society, which is quick to judge a woman who must follow.”

       Despite the fact that we like to think that gay behavior often means the rejection of patriarchal normativity, here it only supports and reinforces it. Wives are not permitted to enquire about their husband’s sexual lives.

       This is a beautiful and quite powerful film and recontextualizes gay behavior in a world of hidden male religious power from which women are ostracized.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

      

Harsh Agarwal and Sumit Pawar | Vaidya / 2021

THE BOY BY THE SEA

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harsh Agarwal (screenplay), Harsh Agarwal and Sumit Pawar (directors) Vaidya / 2021 [23 minutes]

 

This Indian film in Hindi seems, at first glance, a gay romance in which Kabir (Puneet Kumar Mishra), a middle-aged businessman, meets a beach watcher named Vaidya, who describes himself as a kind of lifeguard. But questions put to him are regularly answered rather obliquely. Why, for example, is Kabir’s billfold, which he lost in a quick swim in his rolled-up pants, returned to him still dry?

     Why has Vaidya never before tasted alcohol? And why does he have no telephone or other contact, suggesting that Kabir will simply find him always on the same beach?

     Kabir senses almost immediately that that there is something unusual about this young man, and the relationship they soon develop appears to be something he has never before experienced. While Kabir answers rather Vaidya’s questions rather straight-forwardly, Vaidya evades direct answers with metaphors and other linguistic ruses.

      Anwesh Sahoo at Gaylaxy notes Kabir’s directness:

     “Kabir shares with Vaidya what brings him to Goa, ‘Beech beech mein jeene ke bahane dhundte rehta hoon (I keep looking for reasons to live).’ to which Vaidya asks, ‘Toh mila kya? Bahana? (Did you find it? The reason to live?)’ and their hands swiftly come together. The subtle moments work. There’s no moment in the film really where they are out and about proclaim their love for each other, but you see it in their eyes, the longing, the angst, the fondness and in the end the uncertainty and frustration [on Kabir’s part]. The film stays true to its namesake, mysterious yet gripping for most parts.”

   At first, I suspected in the generalness with which Vaidya answered his questions, and from Kabir’s comment that the boy’s lips tasted of salt, that perhaps the handsome young man was a kind of meerman, the male counterpart of a mermaid, that goes all the way back to Greek and Roman mythology, and reoccurs in Scandinavian, Germanic, and Celtic literatures. The monster known as the Gill-man from the film Creature from the Black Lagoon might be perceived as a modern adaptation of the merman myth. Each day of his vacation, indeed, Kabir seeks out the boy by the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, and takes him back to his hotel room for sex.

     When it finally comes time for Kabir to fly back to his home in the inland Indian city of Gurgaon, he begs Vaidya to join him; but once more the young man elliptically explains that he cannot yet travel there, but perhaps will one day.

      On his part, Kabir promises to return soon, emphasizing “I promise to return prepared to take you with me.”

      But upon arriving back in Gurgaon, Kabir’s friends find his story strange and are unconvinced of the innocence of the boy, particularly given that the young man has no method of contacting him. What if Kabir were to be kidnapped they argue, how would they even contact him, or even have a way of tracking down Vaidya.

      Kabir, a practical man locked in his workaday world, gives in to them, not living up to his promise he made to the boy he so loved.

      Years pass, and the rains come to his inland city, with them Vaidya, who confronts Kabir for not remaining true to his promise. Kabir defends himself, saying that there was no way to contact him and a relocation to Goa was impossible. We have to be practical, he again argues.

       Hurt and angry, Vaidya turns to go, telling his former lover that he will return to a place where Kabir will never find him

       It is only as we watch him move toward the ocean and disappear into thin air that we realize that Vaidya is actually part of Indian myth similar to the father-son relationship of the Greek’s Triton, son of the sea-god Poseidon. The final credits reveal that Vaidya is the son of Varuna, the Hindu God of the Sea among other roles he performed.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

 

 

Jan Švankmajer | Spiel mit Steinen (A Game with Stones) / 1965 [animation] || Jan Švankmajer | Rakvičkárna (Punch and Judy) / 1966 [animation] || Jan Švankmajer | Et Cetera / 1966 [animation] || Jan Švankmajer | Picknick mit Weissmann (Picnic with Weissmann) / 1968 [animation] || Jan Švankmajer ||Tichý týden v domé (A Quiet Week in the House) / 1969 [animation]

five shorts by jan švankmajer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan Švankmajer (director) Spiel mit Steinen (A Game with Stones) / 1965 [animation]

Jan Švankmajer (director) Rakvičkárna (Punch and Judy) / 1966 [animation]

Jan Švankmajer (director) Et Cetera / 1966 [animation]

Jan Švankmajer (director) Picknick mit Weissmann (Picnic with Weissmann) / 1968

     [animation]

Jan Švankmajer (director) Tichý týden v domé (A Quiet Week in the House) / 1969 [animation]

 

Prague-born filmmaker Jan vankmajer, who describes himself as a Surrealist, has been a major influence on animators as varied as Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and Tim Burton. Although in more recent years, Švankmajer has made primarily full-length feature films, his earliest works, and some of his most innovative work, was done as shorts, five of which I write about below.

     1965's A Game with Stones features a strange clock, underneath which sits a kind of bucket into which, when the clock strikes at the quarter hours, various amounts of stones plop out of an attached faucet-like tube and into the bucket. While in the bucket the stones take on various patterns, sometimes abstract, at other times positioning themselves in anthropomorphic images; the stones break into small pebbles or fracturing, swallowing each other up. After each "game" or what I might describe as a "dance of stones," the bucket dutifully pours the contents unto the floor below, but by the last series of outpouring rocks, the very weight of the stones has caused the bucket to give way, forcing the final stones through its ruptured bottom to fall directly onto the floor. In this early work, we see images that will appear again and again in Švankmajer's shorts, as natural images turn into human-like figures or themselves become forces which are threatening. There is something menacing about these stones throughout, a fear of their very animation and ability to move into abstract and identifiable images.

     One of the very best of Švankamjer's early films in Punch and Judy which combines puppetry with automatons filled with mechanical gears and a live hamster. The effect is quite surreal as the camera shifts from the robotized motions of the automaton to the repetitive strokings of the hamster and on to the jackhammer attacks of hammers upon the Punch and Judy figures. Combining these with small sets, houses whose inside walls are covered with intriguing collages, and through the very decaying and peeling paint of the puppets, the director evokes an eerie sense of the inevitable death of both characters (they bury one another several times) as, finally, they slip from the puppeteers hands at the end of this moving cinema. By combining these stylized figures with a real, living, breathing animals, Švankmajer creates an even deeper sense of the divisions between life and death, play and reality, and violence and love. It is a beautiful short film, worth viewing again and again.

     Et Cetera, just as its titles suggests, is almost an afterthought, a short piece that breaks into two equal parts connected with images of embroidered letters, much in the style of Gilliam's later Monty Python interludes. The first concerns an Icarus-like figure who is determined to fly, using larger and larger wings each time as he moves from a chair to floor, the next time a bit further, and, finally, flying away and back again. The second half of this short involves an animal trainer, whipping his beast into complex movements, with a sudden switch of the beast obtaining the whip to which the animal trainer jumps and leaps. Another switch completes their saga.

     In both of these parts, animal and man become interchangeable or, at least, interconnected. As in Game with Stones nature overtakes the human even as the human attempts to use nature for his own purposes.

     My favorite of these early shorts is the ghoulish Picnic with Weissmann. In a lovely meadow we observe several chairs, a closed cabinet, a chaise lounge upon which lay a male costume—shirt and pants—a phonograph playing romantic German songs, and other objects, all which seem to have a life of their own. As the afternoon wears down, the chairs move together, tumbling down a long, rock-strewn hill, the records roll away from the phonograph to be replaced by others, and the pants and shirt eat olives, carefully dropping their pits through the sleeve of the shirt into a nearby bowl stationed on a small side table. All of these inanimate objects come so thoroughly to life are quite disconcerting, but the most menacing image of the film is a small trowel that emerges from the nearby cabinet, which throughout the pleasantly playful afternoon digs what appears to be a grave. The songs continue, a breeze comes up, the trees shiver, their leaves falling into large piles covering over several of the objects. The trowel completes digging out the grave. Suddenly the doors of the white cabinet open, where, within, we see a man dressed only in his underwear, bound. His body falls from the cabinet directly into the grave.

     If in the earlier Švankmajer films inanimate objects and nature seemed only slightly threatening, here they become deadly, having overtaken their human counterpart, now freed to celebrate, they take the afternoon in the sun that Weissmann, so it appears, had planned for himself.

      Following in that vein, A Quiet Week in the House (also called The Flat) concerns a young man literally directed by arrows to a room where he is tortured by all sorts of inanimate objects, including a typewriter, various dishes of food, and other household standards. All his attempts at human activity, in short, are foiled as he endeavors to create, eat, and, finally, sleep—the bed itself dissolving into the down of its pillows and coverlet and shavings of wood. Even an attempt to peer through a window ends up with a seemingly divine punch in the face.

     An older man appears with a chicken and hatchet, clearly expecting the young man to decapitate the fowl. When the young man refuses, he hands him the hatchet which the young man uses to break down what appears to be a door. Behind it is only a wall where numerous others, obviously trapped in the same situation as our young hero, have created a graffiti of names and dates. Bending down with a provided pencil, the young man adds his name to the others that came before him.

 

Los Angeles, March 28, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2012) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).