Three libertines of the time of the French King Louis XVI have been humiliated when they were thrown out of his presence and left to fend for themselves, and they're not happy about it. With vengeance in mind, they assemble in this forest, brought there by their bearers, to draw up their plans for getting their own back, relishing the stories of extreme violence that the court of the Kings of France have brought about. Yet as the evening draws on, and a group of servants and fellow libertines arrive to make up the numbers, they become increasingly distracted by the potential for out of doors fun with each other...
However, so louche are they that simply having sex will not be enough for them, they have to indulge in enthusiastic perversion as well… Writer and director Albert Serra is a curious fellow, a filmmaker seemingly in search of an audience to shock rather than an aesthetic to aspire to, or rather, he found his aesthetic, and that was to shock. The film he made before this, Last Days of Louis XIV, garnered some pretty decent reviews and even found some admirers among cineastes, but that apparently worried him: it was the old Groucho Marx quip or problem about not wishing to belong to any club that would want him as a member.
So Liberté was made as a reaction to that acceptance, something so hard to watch, such an endurance test that only the most hardcore of art film lovers would be able to tolerate it. To that end, you cannot say he did not succeed, as almost nobody who watched it enjoyed what they saw. On the other hand, the number of viewers who made it through to the end of this, never mind even started it even out of curiosity, must have been fairly small. It contained violence, but it was sex that was on its mind, and not missionary position all lived happily ever after sex, either, as the aristocrats would fit in with the actual comedy documentary The Aristocrats in light of their activities here.
Plus it was about as entertaining as hearing the same unfunny joke and its variations told over and over ad nauseam, as the characters paired off to sometimes have sex, other times indulge in sexual torture, which was not a bad description of the experience of seeing this. There was spanking, urination, analingus, and more, but there was not much pleasure to be seen, possibly some comment on the bourgeoisie as these efforts tended to be. Indeed, so jaded were the libertines that their plotting against the King falls by the wayside when they become carried away with their orgy, all scored to the sound of chirping insects constantly clicking on the soundtrack. Most of the time it was too dark to see what was going on, though every so often boobs, bums or a flaccid penis would hove into view to be attended to by one of the other attendees to this event.
Punctuating this was chatter about how they were going to get their own back, and there was actually murder involved, though with such lack of interest it might as well have been an accident at work. There was one big star here, or he used to be anyway, the now in his seventies Helmut Berger who showed up as the elderly Duke who had a joyless servicing much as all the other characters did, no matter what their class was. You were either going to be bored out of your mind within about twenty minutes - monotonous was one word for this - or you were going to be lulled into a kind of hypnotic engagement as it chuntered on, there was no real middle ground. But the impression was that Serra was never going to find his shocked audience, if only because he was never going to be a household name: it was solely the extreme cinema brigade who would seek this out, and the vast majority would say they were welcome to it and move on, next to oblivious and certainly not considering watching it.
