into the enterprise shades into a sorrow that
is genuinely moving. This nearly three-hour
movie takes place over three drifting days
that seem to stretch time itself—an effect
crucial to its emotional impact. The dread
that descends overOnce Upon a Time con-
cerns what lies ahead: Rick reckons with his
fading relevance as the industry changes
around him, Cliff confronts the souring of
the summer of love, and Sharon watches
herself on the big screen, blissfully unaware
of the mayhem to come. As for Tarantino, he
insists on keeping this impossible California
dream alive just a while longer—he may be
rewriting the past, but what he truly and
desperately wants is to forestall the future.
An earlier revolutionary era comes to
light—or rather, a dim, penumbral half-
light—in Albert Serra’sLiberté, by far the
most anomalous film at this year’s festival.
Serra has made a specialty of bringing the
weight of lived experience to depictions of
the distant past, and he returns here to the
late 18th century, in effect staging scenes
from Sade within a setting out of Frago-
nard. Libertéunfolds over the course of one
night in a European forest clearing where a
retinue of libertines have gathered to par-
take of a wide range of sexual practices that
contemporary parlance would term BDSM.
A born provocateur, Serra has worked
productively across artistic forms in recent
years, emphasizing cinematic qualities of
duration and immersion in gallery and the-
ater contexts. Libertéis the third and final
iteration of a project that was first staged as
a play at the Volksbühne in Berlin (also
called Liberté) and then presented as a two-
screen video installation, Personalien, at the
Reina Sofia in Madrid. Of the three, the
play contains the most narrative informa-
tion, situating the action on the eve of the
French Revolution and incorporating a plot
that involves converting the novices at a
nearby convent into courtesans—all of
which is barely mentioned in the film.
Personalien, which puts the spectator
between two facing screens, effectively
induces an experience of watching while
being watched, as in a cruising ground—a
play of gazes that the film achieves
through surprising shifts in points of view.
Just as Serra’s previous narrative feature,
The Death of Louis XIV, concerned not only
death but its representation, this plotless yet
eventful film engages themes of desire,
decadence, morality, perversity, and the
erotic imagination while posing formal and
moral questions about the representation
of the sex act, and indeed the limits of the
representable. There is a fair amount of
unsimulated action, but Libertéresembles
no pornography you’ve ever seen. Exploit-
ing shadow and off-screen space, Serra
heightens the tensions between the visible
and the hidden, the seen and the heard;
some of the most shocking acts are not per-
formed but recounted (in copious detail),
reverberating as mental images. To invoke
Amos Vogel, Liberté is some kind of land-
mark in the history of film as a subversive
art: at once mesmerizing and enervating,
structured around nothing but a pursuit of
carnal gratification that never arrives. July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 67The increasingly feverish cross-cutting of Zombi Childbuilds, as in House
of Toleranceand Nocturama, to a collapse of time and space, a dissolution
of selves, a rearrangement of hierarchies and assumptions.
University of Minnesota Press
http://www.upress.umn.edu | (800) 621-2736A lifetime of cinematic
writing culminates
in this breathtaking
statement on film’s
unique ability to
move us
“How fortunate that Gilberto
Perez finished this book
before his untimely death.”
—Jonathan Rosenbaum,
film critic and author of
Cinematic EncountersLibertéFollow us on Twitter!
@FilmComment