Brief Thoughts on La Libertad
By Zach Campbell
Is the title, La Libertad, ironic? Is the protagonist, Misael, free in the nature
of his labor and solitude, or is he burdened by its necessity? Lisandro Alonso lulls the
viewer into hypnosis, particularly in the early scenes, initially presenting the honesty of
this outdoor labor as attractive. But one scene in the film has Misael asking a friend by
payphone to visit his mother and tell her he’s well and will be home in a month. This youth’s
‘pastoral existence’ is likely an economic necessity—and rather than being the supreme being
in his pampas domain, Misael seems in fact to be a cog in a backwoods capitalist machine.
He practically lives off the woods he cuts down, needling a stressed buyer to pay for second-rate lumber.
“Are there any girls here?” he asks a gas station attendant, who suggests that some might
come later. Misael suggests he’ll return, but the film shows him hunting down his dinner—
an armadillo that he prepares and grills in an extended return to the shot that opens the film.
Alonso’s choice to come full circle with this image suggests repetition and circular time.
If the film is to be read with this symmetry in mind, then the throbbing techno music that
accompanies the opening credits is contrasted with the nighttime sounds of fire and crickets
that continue on the soundtrack even after the haunting image of Misael cuts to black.
La Libertad represents what seems to be a strand in world cinema right now. Alain Guiraudie's
No Rest for the Brave (though a far more fantastical and hyperactive film) came to mind
as I was feeling out Alonso's rhythms and his sense of color and pacing. The convergence can't
be merely coincidental. Writing for Senses of Cinema on the 2001 New York Film Festival, Jared Rapfogel
grouped together Damien Odoul's Deep Breath, Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga,
La Libertad, and Guiraudie's That Old Dream That Moves as being connected by
"their extremely free approach to narrative, concentrating more on conjuring a certain atmosphere,
exploring a certain small corner of society, and focusing on the down-time between events, than
on telling a story.” Is this a new aesthetic and political permutation in film? To emphasize
ritual and habit, to magnify and amplify solitude, to mingle the mundane with the bizarre and
even surreal: this seems to be the project of a film like La Libertad. We may be just
beginning to ask the Deleuzian question, “How do these films think?”