Courtesy FreibeuterFilm
If you’ve ever had even slight concerns about the efficacy of any prison system, or felt even more skeptical about what benefit such places provide to society at large, Great Freedom might prove your concerns justified.
Despite the post-Holocaust liberation, gay men didn’t find freedom. Taken from death camps, they were incarcerated immediately, and it’s there that we catch up with Hans (Franz Rogowski), a man imprisoned for his “perverted” activities. It would break most others, but through a decades-long bond with straight inmate Viktor (Georg Friedrich), Hans’ imprisonment leads to an unusual form of dependence that softens systemic brutality while uncovering a shared humanity between two men with otherwise opaque personalities; notions of masculinity are thus torn asunder.
Great Freedom is a purposefully ironic title, and it coaxes the audience into forging their own paths to discovery surrounding what it is to be free. Hans and Viktor spend decades alongside the viewer fantasizing about freedom only to find the laws which put them away have ultimately marked them with another kind of death sentence. Despite an evolving society outside, the prison stamp does its job.
Director Sebastian Meise (Still Life) uses color sparingly and often delves into expected motifs, ranging from windows to a burning matchstick, as metaphors for a more nebulous concept of freedom. Its simplicity is effective: Imprisonment dulls what being free and love are—and can be—yet Meise offers hopeful glimmers of the spaces in which humanity might be found. They are not always physical or even particularly tangible. Think on it.
Audiences may find a challenge in the slow, methodical pacing, though. Great Freedom is not, gracefully, a showy experience. Instead, it focuses far more on its performances, and while its third act might be overlong, find here yet another example of a film that eschews jumpy action-style camerawork for effective lighting cues and deep performances.
Imprisoning gay men was (and remains for most minority groups) a cultural genocide not merely designed to put people away, but to break up every facet of their lives. Great Freedom notes how gay men were never truly freed of the Holocaust, even long after. Instead, they continued suffering mental shackles for decades after liberation. For its pessimism, Meise’s vision is unusually humanistic, but it never strays or shies from its messaging about generations of queer men post-WWII, or the world’s collective shoulder-shrug during and afterwards.
8
+Magnificent performances and direction
-Pacing can grate
Great Freedom
Directed by Meise
With Rogowski, Friedrich and Anton von Lucke
Center for Contemporary Arts, NR, 116 min
