LIBERTÉ
2019, 138’
Director: Albert Serra
Countries: France, Portugal, Germany, Spain
Distributor: Films Boutique
Language: o.v. French with Italian subtitles
1774, shortly before the French Revolution, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin. Banned
from the puritanical court of Louis XVI, the libertines Madame de Dumeval, the Count of Tésis
and the Duke of Wand go in search of the support of the legendary Duke of Walchen, a German
philanderer and freethinker who now lives alone in a country reigned by hypocrisy and false
virtue. Their mission is to export libertinism, an Enlightenment philosophy founded on the
rejection of authority and morality, and to find a safe place to pursue their goals, in which the
pursuit of pleasure only obeys laws dictated by unfulfilled desires.
Presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, Liberté ended
Albert Serra’s tetralogy on the 18th century, which he began with Story of My Death that tells
the tale of a long night of pleasure and hidden sexual fantasies. Albert Serra explores
perversion and the liberation of the body without a moralistic gaze, featuring twilight settings and
the rapport between voyeurism and exhibitionism. The cast includes Helmut Berger, an iconic
actor for Luchino Visconti (The Fall of the Gods, Ludwig) who, playing on the overlap between
actor and character, portrays the Duke of Walchen, a legendary German seducer.
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