Expelled from the court of the last French king, the puritanical Louis XVI, a group of sybarites gather secretly for a long night in the dark woods to stage a stylized private revolution to presage the one soon to topple the monarchy. A meditation on eros, perversion and cinematic voyeurism, Liberté stands as a darker companion piece of sorts to La mort de Louis XIV by allowing the hard lines of class, aristocratic pretension and court ritual to be sharply expressed in the awkward exchanges animating the theatrically extended dalliances between the libertines. A challenging entry in Serra’s oeuvre, Liberté uses its extended length and solemn pacing to distill cinematic performance to a dark master-servant essence and to explore almost Batallian ideas about the intertwining of eros, boredom and the death drive.