Since Great Freedom opens with 16 mm footage observing clandestine hookups in a public men’s room, you could almost think there was some sort of Brian De Palma-ish voyeurism at play. But while director/co-writer Sebastian Meise has a similar iron hand of tonal control over the material, this footage is actually revealed to be evidence against Hans Hoffman (Franz Rogowski). As part of Paragraph 175, the German criminal code’s proscription of homosexual activity between males, Hoffman is sent to jail.
We begin in 1968, before subsequent timeslips to 1945 and 1956. These shifts in time hit with the force of a brick to the chest, each subsequent jump the reopening of a wound, with mustache and skin as the signifiers — the sets are the same. So are the attitudes, as Hans endures (and that is the correct word for the situation — he and countless other gay men had no other option but to take whatever society dished out) the contempt of the whole damn world. But he still manages to find the kindness to keep an eye out for other Paragraph 175ers who aren’t capable of hanging in there.
What are your addictions? For some, it’s drugs. For some, it’s sexual freedom. For others, it’s survival. In Hans’ on-again, off-again cellmate Viktor (Georg Friedrich), it’s a two-form habit of heroin and (the illusion of) respectability. And in Hans, we’ve got a character whose hunger for justice and decency just can’t be extracted from his erotic self. Rogowski is probably best known to American audiences from Petzold’s Undine and Transit and Malick’s A Hidden Life, but real arthouse-heads know him as the guy who stole Schanelec’s I Was at Home, But… (though he’s in only two scenes). It’s overly limiting to call him the most exciting actor in German-language cinema, because he has a quality that invites the most analytical of audience eyes. A dreamier Joaquin Phoenix, sure, but also a performer with a gift for liminal incarnation, capable of handling genre shifts and unconventional narrative choices with an ease that no one else in contemporary world cinema has.
You’ve got to respect any film about maintaining queer dignity in the face of omnipresent prejudice and the vicissitudes of an unjust system with a free-jazz score — just as it makes one of its foundation points the kindness and decency of tattoo artists. This is a different kind of film, not interested in prison clichés or noble gay martyrs. It stays in the subconscious, popping up unexpectedly long after seeing the film — or viscerally and immediately when you read some of the anti-gay bullshit being shoveled in statehouses throughout the country.
Great Freedom is spare and deliberate and focused on the strength required to soldier on in a hopeless place. What Meise and Rogowski accomplish here is deeply moving and ultimately shattering. Apart from all the usual signifiers that we as viewers associate with prison cinema, Great Freedom gradually builds its resonance like a Bresson film, but horny. Paul Schrader would probably dig this. Hopefully you will too.
