Faced with logic by rational force, millimeter and, given the circumstances, procazively sterile of the elections, the obscene and obligatorily fertile arbitrariness of desire. Pure irrationality. Basically, this is the great fight that, far from the spotlights and televised gatherings, will be lived this Sunday in the dark room of a cinema in Seville, at the European Festival that opens tomorrow. The person responsible for this unequal struggle is Albert Serra, the Catalan director of birth, destination Spanish, adoption French and universal because, as he says, "culture has no more nationality than the world." If Salvador Dalí deserves a reincarnation, it belongs to him. Liberté , which is what people in and around Paris call for freedom, is the title of their excessive and proverbial last film. Next week (November 15) arrives in theaters after being awarded in Cannes with the Special Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard .
"The film stems from a negative criticism that I read about myself and about the original play that I presented at the Volksbühne in Berlin," he says by way of presentation. And he continues: «The chronicler said indignantly that he left the actors two and a half hours on stage ... And that made me think. Indeed, that is what it is about, forcing the viewer to live that same abandonment ». Until arriving at the film, the original performance became before installation and as such it was exhibited in Reina Sofía. In all three cases, with a slight modulation of the complicity experienced and suffered by the one who looks (voyeur, therefore), it is about attending a thorough and very lascivious treatise of desire. The story (more or less) stops in a dark place in a dark forest located on the dark road that leads from Berlin to Potsdam, back in 1774. A group of French libertines flee the conservative acolytes of Louis XVI with the hope of export its uncontrollable love philosophy to Germany. Soon, that will be the scenario not so much for perversion, but also for the simple freedom experienced from the deepest and ungovernable part of the body. Anything goes. Everything is meat.
«I am not in favor of interpreting anything, but somehow what is discussed and exhibited is the current difficulty of managing that harmony of the bodies that were lived in the past. I speak of the 18th century and the 60s. Now there is a friction that is very present and that prevents us from abandoning ourselves to joy, which avoids risk, which prevents us from managing the most intimate drive . It has to do with the rules that flood everything and with the many expectations that can never be met, ”says Carrerilla and on.
The film throws a group of swingers into the well of their cravings, their fluids and their skin. Half in darkness, the other half hidden. They are people carried by that desire that is nothing more than the essence of man. With Spinoza, if man is an existing being and is aware of his existence, it is as much as he wishes; desire moves us to remain and increase what we are . They talk about sex, they touch each other, they lick each other, they offer themselves naked in each of their pores and their chinks and then they even hurt themselves. For pure pleasure. And so, little by little, more and more unpleasant, obscene and cruel until dawn. And when it dawns, we are in the present perhaps.
The film is the result of 19 nights of filming that threw a total of 300 hours of recording. Professional actors (including Helmut Berger) mingle with friends of the director, debuting technicians such as interpreters and sponsors signed on Facebook. «He left them at his leisure until they lost consciousness of being in a movie. The cameras are kept away and without interfering, ” says the director. And indeed, what arises does not admit neither definition nor categories. Everything is rigorously new. First seen. Dazzling in his abjection every time, as the film progresses, more evident. The viewer emerges from the empty, exhausted and new projection. "The logic of the night that leaves you zero," he says. It is like that.
But there is also political reading for all this. There is talk of lack of communication and just the opposite of politics. «Culture is intimacy and that is where I am interested in being. Nothing to do with politics in its most vulgar sense. In the cruising in which the characters unfold there is something political too. There is a leveling of everything where nothing matters, nor the size of the member. It is egalitarian. Everyone is devoted to the generosity of giving, not receiving ... What is happening right now in Catalonia has nothing to do. It is political, but in its worst sense. There is now a conflict between legality and legitimacy that does not seem to have a solution or remedy. As long as the extremes refuse to respect each other, we are doomed to conflict. Catalan logic leads to the conflict between Israel and Palestine » . And there, so far from desire and so close to the abyss, he leaves it.
Liberté will be seen in Seville in full elections. "It is the irrationality of the body against the logic of the unarmed," he concludes.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- movie theater
- culture
The definitive Star Wars trailer: "I look for the last time ... at my friends"
Culture The great madness of Antonio Banderas: "I didn't want to die without doing this"
Photography Norman Parkinson, the photographer who reinvented fashion and pop culture