Open the gates to hell, says a man in a carriage in the night in the woods and starts sucking woman’s bare ass with his tongue out. There is no hiding, all happens out in the open. Wild bushes look far from tended gardens, a kind of backyard or wasteland where voyers and perverts meet. Man outside the luxury carriage watches the act in little light there is. He looks like the help and has a rope with him.
Albert Serra’s movie Liberté from 2019 is 132 minutes of French aristocracy fucking in the woods at night. Sounds are nocturnal, animal and bird sounds, crickets, and people having sex, panting, wipping, heavily breathing, asking for more, staring at the fucking, staring in the dark, little talk. All wear wigs and base themselves in to the fancy carriages looking abandoned, in between the sex acts looking like waiting for something. Men talk about how revolution comes about and wish for it.
It looks picturesque until someone masturbates watching woman get wipped and not getting enough. She likes it. They are there for qrotesque pleasure and not wishing to be rescued. Marie Antoinette with her lamb but in a porno setting and in the dark, lamb being eaten as well as genitalia and asses.
Woman hanging by her hands naked gets milk poured over her, men watching her agony as her feet don’t touch the ground. She wants more. She likes it. It could be pornography, but for that it is not giving all. Liberté is an art movie on Mubi and gives vibes that are translated to this day and reminds me of the decadent images from the time before the French revolution and the corrupt perverted aristocracy looks like themselves, not getting enough of anything like today and waiting for the uprising which they think they’ll make.
One pays attention to the scene and audio landscape, which is the dark woods, where this fancy lot are not disturbed. Orgy is on and gives a feeling the end is near. People speak in French, German and Italian. It is a group expelled from the court of Louis XVI. Duc de Walchen is a fictional character who is a seducer and freethinker and has philosophy centered on rejection of morality and authority. Vulgarity and excess go as far as the receiving end can tolerate and it looks like freedom is undisturbed, something to test and food for rumours and charicatures on satirical cartoons. Reimagining a French sex party, limitless search for one’s own pleasure and possibility to turn a sadist. Nothing new or unexpected. We know and they knew all of the pieces of deprativety are there and is an ongoing circle. Nature doesn’t mind. People vanish, but don’t change. Nature grows on covering what humans have done. Wild is what nature is and humans can try imitate this wilderness and dark cold.
As a satire movie thinks on freedom and taking freedoms, punishments, survival with which woods and darkness resonate, the musicless brutality, emptiness and desire to be lost. Realisation of being lost and not recovering. Aristocracy and cruelty, which is just human behaviour what money and power bring, when there isn’t much hindering to yearnings other than the king and the public. Fear of losing it all. Maybe not even that. Fear and pain are something to play with.
Admiration for the nature and the naked man being part of it minus the fancy clothes and wigs that tell who you are and can or will eventually escape. Option to return to the pedestal and society must be there. Carriages that have stopped in the bushes caress the eye and the contemporary need for luxury. Lights are gone though. Looking for the original man, his/her lust which is outside and there unstrained, the beast within. Young woman kills an old man whom is held together by two men and left behind. Bloodlust of the rich is no secret.
As a pure porno flick it would work brilliantky too. The French Revolution is so pivotal in Europe’s history, bringing down the rich and royal, dream of revolution is a violent fantasy made true which these aristocrates think they do: they have fantasies too and violence is a big part of it. Women command as much as men: hit harder. Fuck me. You’ll get punished if you can’t fuck anymore. You hit like a child, says the woman. Peeing on a man wearing corset and wig, the onlookers are awkward. Men on carriages analyse what these acts mean. All goes to crucifixion and wipping of the Christ. Imagination to these people is this: woman gets fucked so she vomits, man then kisses her and swallows her vomit and shits it out. This sounds satisfactory. When woman bleeds the’ll have a mass. It is a kind of a vampire story. No sunlight.
Movie Quills (2001) by Philip Kaufman hits the same theme: decadence and experimenting the limits of morals of society. Marquis de Sade interests still today and the disgustingness going far beyond proper explores how to find freedom and the movie when freedom is taken away, as Marquis is put in an asylym for the insane instead of prison to avoid a scandal as a request by his wife. De Sade keeps writing for the insane and the people working at the asylum. Pleasures of flesh and pornographic texts have been popular fun. Depravity and contempt for the human virtue by the marquis is not to be underestimated nor is human need for pleasure, fun, power, subjugation, freedom and torture of body, which is a religious practise turned sexual or other way round. Priest taking care of the insane believes nobody is born bad and tries to keep the asylym going and respectable.
Marquis does in his life the same things as he writes about, nutters go wild and to activate his fellow crazies, he writes plays that resemble people marquis crashes with whom loath de Sade but do themselves the same revolting sexual acts. The maid played by Kate Winslet brings marquis white paper between the clean sheets and carries finished pages for horny readers and listeners as the maid reads them for pleasure and excitement, how else.
Filth for the people, from the rightgeous and who know their worth. Worth is the setting: big house, nice clothes and respected profession. Marquis goes far in laughing at the respectable and wealthy, what they do behind closed doors. Marquis gets punished. Corporal punishments were also the cure for mental illnesses. His writing equipment and clothes are taken away. To write with blood doesn’t work as well as writing with his own excrement on the walls of his cell. Freedom of the writer can be taken away by killing him, material is always there.
Movie is situated in time after the revolution and in the reign of Napoleon to whom marquis’ texts are read out loud while Banaparte gets his portrait made.
Quest for freedom and fairness is a violent one and the one, who uses violence as brutally and forcefully as possible, has imagination and ability to lose basic notion of decency, lets go so to speak and how law should be practiced, grabs power. Should it be called the one who wins? Why sadists win, why violence is the winning method and why people get pleasure from violence? Watching it and doing violent acts, also being hit and treated badly, subjugated. It’s a big why and a question for psychology, but somehow we do know the answer, because violence is our nature and we like watching bad things happen. How else explain anything?
European revolutions have tupsy turvied the continent and still fascinate how they became. People who made them and those who fell under the blade and how freedom was made.
Debouchery as freedom is the practise and is destructive. When there are no limits or testing goes wild, someone gets hurt. Sometimes that is the point.
