Great Freedom

We're tired of Pride!", "Why Pride?" "We don't want any more Pride". Yes, I have read and heard this a lot this year, 2023. In my home country of Norway, in 2022 there was even a terrorist attack against a gay pub. Two innocent people were killed.

This film perhaps clearly shows why Pride, why Pride and gay rights are about human rights. We are not free until everyone is free. This film is strong and very current. It shows what happened to homosexuals who practiced their sexuality in the 50s and 60s. Prison where they received degrading treatment from both other inmates, staff and society's moral pointer.

As I write this, there is an increase in the number of countries where homosexuality is banned and queers are persecuted. So we need movies like this, as a constant reminder of how NOT to treat difference and gays.

The film is also an experience in itself. Character actor Franz Rogowski carries this film, mostly with what he doesn't say, but shows.

Strong stuff here.

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.

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.

You're not like them, incarceration is imposed, you have no right to act in ways you're predisposed, it's an outrage, a disease, we will use our expertise, into the cell, you'll go to hell, you've been exposed.

It's important to remember the inhuman things governments (often elected but not always) did to people who didn't conform to their misguided beliefs, doctrine and dogma. Here, the always impressive Franz Rogowski gives us Hans, a perpetually convicted gay man who spends most of his adult days behind bars, just for being himself. Ably supported by a host of fine performances, you're left wondering how many people over the ages have been persecuted in this way and how many are still living in fear today in some parts of the world.

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.