Große Freiheit

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.

For two hours I chose to sit through incessant violence, injustice, humiliation, most horrible expressions of human weakness in order to see the gem of a human soul. I would refer to this one as genocide-themed or even the Holocaust but there's so much more to it. Despite the obvious background, it is all about endurance, fearlessness and as simple as it is: a Human Heart.

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.

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.

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.