"Garrel honors the individual by refusing to embellish or soften life's verities in any way. In that sense he is a deeply political artist....Where many films are crafted to have the appearance of a series of disconnected moments drawn from life that somehow make up a story, Garrel's cinema actually and fully fits that description. Liberté, la nuit, his one period piece and a tribute to his parents (his father, the actor Maurice Garrel, appears in the film) and their friends in the arts who risked their lives for the FLN during the Algerian war, is made up of simple moments of singing beauty punctuated with episodes of murderous violence that have twice the force that they would in a run-of-the-mill film dealing with 'political conflict.' For Garrel, the only real political conflict is between individuals trying to navigate a real and free life (and in this case trying to help others do the same) and the murderous intrusion of the state. His philosophy is that the only thing worth talking about is a man, a woman, and a child, and every other structure is either superfluous or destructive."-Kent Jones, Film Comment