Liberté

This is both Serra’s most uncompromising film and his most enjoyable. In a way, it’s perhaps a stunning refute to the notion of “edgelord” as pejorative term; someone has to deliberately provoke to show us something we haven’t seen before.

The movie is a visual investigation into the roots of sexual liberation in societies steeped in repression. Watching it from start to finish is a means of engaging with the inquiry at its center.

This film is an ordeal that I never want to go through again, but it’s undoubtedly executed with a cerebral conviction and uncompromising seriousness that no Anglo Saxon film-maker could approach.

For the most part, though, Liberté is a drearily alienating experience; Serra’s depictions are characterized mainly by studied grotesquerie and tedious monotony.

Liberté is shocking, but it is staged as banally as possible.

Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — Liberté plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.

It's as if a bunch of horny grad students decided to loot a costume store and then remake Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom with camera phones, but less fun.