Große Freiheit

This explored something rarely seen in prison movies, same-sex love more specifically in a post-Nazi Germany before they abolished Paragraph 175, a German law that criminalized sexual acts between men.

Emotional, slow, tender, powerful, violent, unpleasant, and tense with great performances by everyone while navigating multiple timelines effortlessly.

The movie "Great Freedom" emphasizes how a simple paragraph of the German Criminal Code punished same-sex relationships for more than a century in Germany. Director and writer Sebastian Meise purposely place two incarcerated individuals in the same prison cell for a certain period of time: one for being a criminal and the other just for being homosexual. Two marginalized characters who accept their fates and the bitterness of their lives.

The sad and lonely life of homosexual Hans Hoffmann, from suffering in concentration camps to prison in the 20th century, hasn't changed anything: the tortures, prejudices, and tattoos marks were the same, whether under the Nazi regime or under the American allies regime post-war.

It's impossible not to think about so many real gays who went through the same or even worse situations.

Actor Franz Rogowski as the homosexual Hans Hoffmann and Georg Friedrich as Viktor are spectacular, their performances are breathtaking, and they emanate originality and precision throughout the movie.

This movie is a great tribute to everyone who hasn't been able to experience love simply because their partner is of the same sex. It's sad to read some reviews of the movie, I don't think the movie is perfect myself but watch it with Paragraph 175 in mind and the historical value this movie carries, we wouldn't speak freely about LGBTQ+ today.

This film is fictional but history teaches this film is more of a documentary.

Most prison movies do not ackowledge the fact of same-sex love. Most prison movies go out of their way to ignore it. There are exceptions, such as Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), and the jail episode of Todd Haynes' portmanteau work Poison (1991). Grosse Freiheit rises above all of these by dint of its complete absence of sentimentality, the power of its performances, its complex but clearly-told time-frame, and its commitment to effectively portraying love in the hearts of otherwise lost souls. It carefully weaves imagery that would not be out of place in a novel into the story of Germany's incessant persecution of homosexual men, which only stopped when the hated paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code was reformed in 1969.

The film runs on three time lines, in the three decades during which the central character, Hans Hoffman, finds himself in jail for pursuing his desires. Production design and, especially, make-up and costume, work with enormous tact but great effectiveness to conjure up each era. The structure of the film, its story-telling, is really beautifully put together.

There are really only four main characters, of which two are our main concern. They are played brilliantly by Georg Friedrich and, as Hoffman himself, Franz Rogowski, in as shattering a screen performance as you'll ever see.

The final section of the film is perhaps a little glib, but it's a very small flaw in an otherwise masterly movie.

This superbly made prison movie is one of the few that put homosexuality in the epicentre. Great Freedom centers around the postwar life path of a German homosexual which more often than not leads him to incarceration whenever he exercises his Freedom of choice. The irony of the German modernity miracle is plain to see.

The protagonist's -played by Rogowski- pathway intertwines more and more with another inmate's, a drug addict played by Friedrich. Both actors performances are exemplary and the latter shines particularly towards the end.

The film has a low profile, recreating a realistic and moody representation of 1950s- 1970s. There are few colours, just a dark grey and washed away blue are used that help acclimatise the viewer. The incorporation of the 'Great step for mankind' into the prison's microcosm is another brilliant moment.

Understandably, many people will consider this a movie about true love. Whatever that means. More generally, it is a story about human condition and the effort to retain one's defining qualities, our humanity in the most arid wastelands. Ultimately, as Rilke would have put it, this can only be a tale about loneliness.

An emblematic scene arises at the court when the judges clinically y summarise Rogowski's moral crimes and deprivation. The bureaucratic onslaught carried out with impeccable bureaucratic professionalism and disregard for human life leaves the audience numb and speechless.

To capitalism critics the movie offers a striking parable to former-communist countries collapse. The Great Freedom they were promised, never realised. This can explain the last scene, which I nevertheless find more convincing than Moonlight's far-fetched virginity supposition.

In 1980 Frank Ripploh gave us "Taxi zum klo", a raunchy, rather self-satisfied (albeit slightly mocking) look at the gay scene in Berlin of that time, with a singular focus on the bulimic sexual doings of Ripploh, playing himself as one of its committed denizens. With his terrific Austro-German "Great Freedom", Sebatian Meiser takes us back to that period and to all that had gone before and gives a corrective, eschewing all the clichés about gay life, prison life, German life, or just-plain life and love that you can think of. Freedom, he seems to be telling us, comes from within and must be conquered individually, against the massive odds that society puts up against it. Toward the end of this new film, we are given a glimpse of the pseudo-freedom in which Ripploh gloried. Meiser tells us that this Great Freedom is not the real thing at all, and that affirming your sexuality alone, without an understanding of your whole self and the constraints of the world you live in, is meaningless.

At a Q&A at NYC's Film Forum last night, Meiser stated that he had had Franz Rogoski in mind as the protagonist as he was developing the project, and that if Rogoski had turned him down he didn't know what he would have done. Since Hans, Rogoski's character, is present in almost every frame of this picture (including ones shot in total darkness), we are never left in doubt as to why Meiser felt this: Rogoski gives us what has to be one of the most intelligent, committed, uncompromising performances of that past decade, at least. Hans, we learn (or are led to infer), had been convicted of lewd homosexual acts by the Nazis and thrown into a concentration camp (details of all that, and of how he survived, are left to our imaginations) only to be imprisoned again in 1945 under the post-war Allied occupation, to serve out the balance of his sentence. From then onward, his life largely unfolds behind bars, as the German penal code's Paragraph 175, outlawing gay sexual activity, ensures that whenever he gets out of jail and asserts his right to be himself, an unapologetic gay man hungry for connection, he ends up back in prison. Which is where most of the film takes place, within a perfectly realized, relentlessly grim carceral world which differs from the grim outside world only in its details and rituals.

Forget any notions you've gained from redundant genre films about gay people (tormented and/or triumphant), or of any prison film you have ever seen, or of any love story you can think of, or indeed any expectations at all. Rogoski's realization of Meiser's uncompromising vision is note perfect, and therefore harrowing. He has been compared to Joachim Phoenix, and I see the point, but, much as I admire Phoenix when he's in the right hands, Rogoski goes farther and deeper into his character than I have seen Phoenix do. (Though perhaps Phoenix has never gotten to work with a director of Meiser's talent.)

There's plenty of violence here, physical and psychological, but it is treated as being the in the natural order of things: we are not invited to be shocked, or scandalized, but rather to reflect on how banal it is, and on how little prison differs from life outside. In this way, "Great Freedom" (has any movie title ever been as ironic?) takes us back to the existentialists: to Sartre's "Hell is other people", to Camus' Dr. Rieux in Oran under quarantine.

This is a film about being true to yourself, in life and in love, set against a world that has other ideas about who you are and who you are expected to be and that will grind you down every chance it gets. It' a masterpiece.