La libertad (2001)
By now, with a fair few of these under my belt, I've made my peace with the fact that arthouse and I are rarely going to see eye to eye. But even by my own standards, La Libertad tested the limits of that peace. This is arthouse in its purest, most stripped-back form, and I mean that with all the ambivalence it implies.
Lisandro Alonso's 2001 film is, quite literally, a day in the life of a woodcutter. A man chops down a tree, saws it up, eats, naps, relieves himself in the bushes, chops some more, and eventually heads off to sell his wood. That is the film. There is no narration, no story, no score. Just one man, one handheld camera, and a great deal of timber, in near-total silence.
I understand the intention perfectly well. It is a portrait of the working man, of labour as a kind of quiet dignity, of a life lived entirely in the physical present. And I have no doubt that for some viewers, the patience of it, the refusal to editorialise or sentimentalise, amounts to something genuinely beautiful. Alonso is clearly committed to his vision, and the film does exactly what it sets out to do. I'll grant that freely.
But here is where I come at it from a rather different angle than most of its admirers. I have actually done manual work. Not woodcutting, granted, but real, physical, unglamorous graft. And I could not shake one very practical thought for the entire running time: who, exactly, is this for? I struggle to picture anyone clocking off from a gruelling shift, wanting nothing more than to switch off, and choosing to spend the evening watching some other bloke do a hard day's graft in laborious silence. The romance of physical labour tends to appeal most to people who have never had a great deal of it to do.
That might sound uncharitable, and maybe it is. But it is an honest reaction. The film offers no reason to keep watching beyond the working itself. No tension, no character development, no moment where something shifts. When I reviewed Five Dedicated to Ozu, I ran into similar territory, that brand of slow cinema that asks you to find meaning in duration itself, and I came away unmoved there too. Some people are simply wired for that kind of viewing experience. I have come to accept that I am not one of them.
What bothers me most about La Libertad is not that it is boring, though it is. It is that the boredom feels like the point, and I am expected to read that boredom as profundity. There is a certain critical gatekeeping that surrounds films like this one, where to say you found it dull is to reveal some deficiency in yourself rather than to make a reasonable observation about the film. I disagree with that position. Patience is a virtue in a viewer, but it is not an obligation, and a film still has to give you something to be patient for.
So, one star, and a film that does precisely what it means to do, which turned out to be exactly the problem.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2001 | Watched: 2026-08-31
