LIBERTE
Watchable. Writer and director Albert Serra goes back to his favourite pre-Revolution French aristocracy - though here mingling with German and Italian upper classes - set-up but this time to create porn. Guilty pleasure it may be but stretching it to the 'Liberté' slogan to pass the smut off as art seems over the top. Is the movie deeper than body orifices? Numerous men and two women take the liberty of engaging in activities based on permissive violence where they take turns to abuse in extreme ways, e.g. urinating on lovers, or be abused for erotic pleasure. The aristocrats' preferred pastime appears to be the experience, physical and mental, of both unlimited power and unrestrained freedom and being subjected to treatment which in other situations would be unequivocally inhumane. Here's the core: what constitutes freedom for the upper class is what their subjects would call torture and therefore seek liberté a few decades later. The form of the picture is also peculiar - its voyeurism is two-fold: the participants observe others in between their own sadomasochistic acts and the film viewers feel like hiding in the woods to watch the sex exploits themselves. So the film's a bizarre sort of porn with a second bottom.
Watched from a screener, cinematic reception might differ.
No comments:
Post a Comment