75
Though betraying the markings of its original form in its small revolving ensemble, single location, and frequent tableau staging, Liberté conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that’s unique to the language of cinema.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
83
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.
91
The Film Stage by Ethan Vestby
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.
30
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
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.
58
The A.V. Club by Lawrence Garcia
For the most part, though, Liberté is a drearily alienating experience; Serra’s depictions are characterized mainly by studied grotesquerie and tedious monotony.
30
The Hollywood Reporter by Leslie Felperin
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.
50
Liberté is shocking, but it is staged as banally as possible.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
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.
40
With its Sadeian overtones, and glumly perverse excesses, this is not a particularly enjoyable experience. It will be best suited to the more experimental fringes of the festival circuit and to audiences who thought that Salo: 120 Days Of Sodom was too much fun.