Mark Reviews Movies: GREAT FREEDOM

Great Freedom, MUBI

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 21, 2022

Time and again over a long stretch of his life, Hans Hoffmann (Franz Rogowski), the central figure of Great Freedom, has been told and shown that he is not wanted in the place he calls home. That's on account of who he is, to whom he is attracted, and whom he loves. The law essentially dictates that his existence as a gay man is an illegal one.

The place is Germany, and the time within this story amounts to more than three decades of Hans' life. At first, though, co-writer/director Sebastian Meise's film follows Hans near the start of his two-year imprisonment in 1968, after being caught in a sting operation. All of this—from the invasive police tactics, to the cold letter of the law, to the sentence, to the harsh and dehumanizing conditions of the prison—is infuriating. It's only the most recent part of Hans' experience of having his very life taken away from him, and the back-and-forth structure of Meise and Thomas Reider's screenplay is particularly effective in how its gradual revelations of information and sense of repetition create a perpetual sense of despair.

There's more to this story than innate anger and pessimism about a system, though. It's far more personal and intimate in examining how the institutional denial of an individual's worth and how a life of only knowing that denial affect the core of a person.

After footage of the sting operation and an appearance in court, we first meet Hans going through the routine process of entering prison, and it's clear that this is a routine for him (During the initial inspection of his body, he's a step ahead of the instructions from the guards). He enters a cell, with only the basics of a table and a toilet and a cot, and opens the window, taking in the fresh air through the metal bars on his flat, hard bed.

This is the 1968 portion of Hans' life, and there's an eerie feeling of serenity from the man as he goes through the daily motions—time in his cell, working in a sewing shop, walking a line across one part of the yard. Hans knows the official rules, but he also knows the unwritten ones, such as the fact that those imprisoned under "Paragraph 175," as he is, must segregate themselves from the other prisoners. They don't want to associate or even be seen with a gay man.

When Hans spots a prisoner he recognizes, he makes sure to take Viktor (Georg Friedrich) aside, away from prying and suspicious eyes, to catch up with the man. They have a history, and just knowing that much is enough to know that Hans' life to this point has revolved around this prison.

With a stay in solitary confinement, the narrative begins to move freely through time to different periods of Hans' prison experience. The earliest section takes place in 1945, with American soldiers helping the post-war prison staff. By the way, Meise uses the pitch darkness of a solitary confinement cell to make the first, jarring cut of three decades, with a healthy, mustachioed Hans suddenly transforming into a skinnier, clean-shaven one. The visual shock of that editing trick is only the first within this period. We once again meet Viktor, who is Hans' cellmate and whose attitude toward the new inmate, once he sees the number 175 on Hans' identification card, is far more hostile.

The final jolt arrives when Viktor spots a numbered tattoo on Hans' forearm. In that moment, Meise provides the cruel lesson of the law under which our protagonist finds himself in prison—and, because of it, will find himself there for a portion of his life. Hans was in a concentration camp, because the law that makes him "illegal" in post-war Germany was made that way under the Nazis. Even Viktor, who wants nothing to do with Hans upon learning of his crime, can't abide the corruption and hypocrisy of Germany retaining that part of its recent history. The two become friends—as much as they can under the circumstances. The terrible irony is that this relationship, which evolves to become free of judgment (Hans never asks why Viktor is in prison, and when he volunteers the details much later, nothing changes on Hans' end) and more impactful than any other in the two men's lives, is only possible because of those circumstances.

There are other relationships here, mainly between Hans and a pair of men, at different periods of his imprisonment, who are there because of their romantic and/or sexual connection to him. One is Leo (Anton von Lucke), a teacher who is arrested following the 1968 police operation, and the other is Oskar (Thomas Prenn), who is Hans' partner in the 1950s—the final period that the narrative follows. In the foreground of the mostly unchanging prison over those decades, Hans and those men try to find some sense of intimacy and self.

If there's some hope in the possibility of obtaining that to any degree in this situation, the difficult truth, which Hans learns and adjusts to as the years pass, is that the prison established by this law extends further than the walls of this place. It becomes a part of how he thinks, and the evolution of that is as much in Rogowski's layered, understated performance as it is in the juxtapositions of the multi-decade narrative.

The key, though, is the bond between Hans and Viktor. In the specifics, it's tender and empathetic, but the sneaky part of Great Freedom, which doesn't become fully clear until the film's final scene, is also in how Viktor, in a subtle way, also comes to represent the place and mindset that gradually define these lives. As a result, there's a sort of cruel compassion to this story, embodied in an ending that's equally hopeful and tragic.

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