Monthly Archives: March 2022

  • Great Freedom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Grosse Freiheit

    Sebastian Meise (2021)

    Most of Great Freedom takes place inside a prison.  Until the last few of its 116 minutes, the screen shows things happening elsewhere only twice, and briefly.  The opening sequence, accompanied by the whirring of a projector, comprises a hidden camera’s flickering record of encounters in a public toilet; the video, though of poor quality, captures a series of sex acts involving the same man with several different partners.  The footage is being played to a West German court of law where the main cottager, Hans Hoffmann (Franz Rogowski), pleads guilty as charged, and is sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.  It’s 1968.  The second out-of-jail sequence, perhaps about halfway through the film, is another video recording, this one made by Hans himself in the mid-1950s.  It mostly features another young man, Oskar (Thomas Prenn), posing and laughing beside a lake; at one point Hans, also looking happy, appears alongside Oskar.  The first video shows Hans and others urgently and furtively satisfying their physical needs.  The second suggests a relaxed relationship involving more than sex.  The conjunction and opposition of Hans’s lusts and capacity to love are at the heart of Sebastian Meise’s complex, troubling film.

    Taken down to start his sentence in 1968, Hans evidently isn’t a newcomer to the prison system.  Stripped, he bends over for an anal examination without needing to be asked.  Stitching sheets in the prison workshop, he catches the eye of an older prisoner – they clearly recognise one another.  A few screen minutes later, Hans has been placed in solitary confinement and the door slams shut, leaving him in darkness; light returns to show him in the same place, and the screen announces ‘1945’.  The man from the workshop twenty-three years later is Viktor Kohl (Georg Friedrich), a convicted murderer and heroin addict, who will be Hans’s cellmate during this earlier incarceration and who is at first enraged by the prospect.  A notice on their cell door confirms that Hans is serving time for violation of ‘paragraph 175’, the provision in the German penal code that outlaws homosexuality.  Viktor launches immediately into a virulent homophobic rant, warning that he’ll kill Hans if he tries anything on.  When he notices the concentration camp number stamped on Hans’s forearm, Viktor’s attitude begins to change.

    Viktor is also shocked, as is the viewer, to discover that Hans has been transferred straight from a concentration camp to an ordinary jail, to serve out a term imposed under the Nazi regime.  The regime didn’t introduce paragraph 175, enshrined in German law since the nineteenth century, but used it to sanction the persecution of homosexuals in the 1930s and early 1940s.  This Nazi link and the seamless continuation of Hans’s sentence immediately after the German surrender of 1945 are important to Great Freedom:  they make West Germany’s failure to reform the law in the early post-war years seem more reprehensible.  The country was hardly exceptional among western European democracies in moving slowly on this[1] but its particular political heritage casts a long shadow and can be used, as Sebastian Meise does use it, to suggest that Hans, imprisoned for ‘deviant practices’ in the decades following World War II, wasn’t much better off than under the Nazis.

    This canny use of actuality to sharpen both the drama and Great Freedom’s polemical edge is reflected in other ways, too.  The look and sounds of the prison may be grimly realistic but it also functions as a less literal, more representative setting – a concentrated illustration of the predicament of gay men in the mid-twentieth century.  In 1957, Oskar is placed in the jail, along with Hans, his lover – so, in 1968, is Leo Giese (Anton von Lucke), apprehended with Hans in the cottage sting:  because they’re all essentially in the same boat, they’re all in the same building.  Meise and Thomas Reider, with whom he wrote the screenplay, don’t detail how many others in the prison are paragraph 175-ers.  Apart from Viktor’s early vitriol, there’s not much sense of homophobia among either the inmates or the staff, even though it’s the latter’s job (according to the film’s scheme) to behave callously.

    While it echoes the public toilet video by being jerky and grainy, the lakeside footage of Oskar and Hans isn’t so neatly integrated into the narrative.  It’s unclear when and by whom it’s being watched.  It serves as a flashback which, as the only one of its kind, seems anomalous; the romance between Hans and Oskar as a whole, although crucial to a main theme of Great Freedom, sticks out as a device to bring that theme into focus.  They sustain a relationship as best they can in prison but Oskar can’t come to terms with love in captivity and commits suicide.  Hans’s distress in the prison yard when he finds out is poignant but there’s greater impact in Viktor’s reaction, fighting his way past a couple of guards in order to hold and console Hans – it’s a key point in the pair’s fascinating and unusual relationship.  Viktor is well aware of what Oskar meant to Hans.  In an earlier scene, he agrees to deliver a love message to Oskar in another section of the prison – the message is coded in pinpricks by Hans on the pages of a Bible – in exchange for Hans ‘helping me out’.  The help consists of oral sex through the food-service hatch in Viktor’s cell door.  When he and Hans become cellmates again in the 1960s part of the story, they eventually sleep together.  Viktor might thereby seem to be a familiar screen drama homophobe – a man who, like the main character in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, is concealing his own gay feelings and projecting the self-hate resulting from them onto others – but he proves to be a more original figure.

    Viktor, who killed a male love rival in a straight relationship, is drawn to Hans less by sexual attraction than by human sympathy.  It’s that quality which prompts him to create a tattoo on Hans’s arm to obliterate the concentration camp number (an operation that’s gruesome to watch).  Viktor wants the blow job through the serving hatch because he feels the need for it; he’s able to ask Hans to do it thanks to a degree of mutual trust between them.  This is a transaction during which Viktor can’t see Hans – a hint that their relationship won’t go soft or be conventionally resolved.  After they’ve spent the night together, Viktor is quick to insist the morning after that this doesn’t mean he’s gay.  There are also occasional (and welcome) humorous exchanges between them.  After they and other prisoners watch the Apollo 11 moon landing on television, Viktor expresses disappointment.  Hans asks what more he expected – for the crew to find aliens?  Yes, why not, Viktor replies.

    I’ve referred to him as Hans throughout but Hoffmann would have been more appropriate, and not just because that’s what the other characters mostly call him.  As a prisoner, he’s Hoffmann, and a prisoner is who he is.  Franz Rogowski has his hair cut differently for each of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.  This serves a useful purpose in clarifying when things are happening, as the narrative switches between timeframes, but Hans doesn’t otherwise look to age much, and this feels right – it’s a way of reinforcing the idea of a fixed identity.  Meise and Reider give their protagonist next to no backstory or context outside jail, even though Hans’s stints inside may not account for that many years of his adult life.  (This isn’t made clear, perhaps deliberately so:  all we know is that he served time at least once in each of three consecutive decades.)  When Leo Giese asks about his work in the outside world, Hans says he does ‘this and that’ – until it’s time for his next custodial sentence.  When he finds out that Leo is, and hopes to return to being, a high-school teacher, Hans changes his evidence about who did what to whom in the cottage.  By saying that he forced Leo into having sex against his will, Hans enables his release.

    Although institutionalisation is an increasingly insistent theme in the closing stages of Great Freedom, the word doesn’t adequately describe Hans’s allegiances to life behind bars.  Viktor, when he decides to shoot up in a toilet moments before the start of his latest parole board hearing, comes across as a relatively straightforward example of someone whose long years of imprisonment have eroded his aptitude for any other environment.  Hans is another, more complicated matter.  After the repeal of paragraph 175, he’s released into what looks to be a brave new world where homosexuality is no longer a crime.  It’s also one in which Meise’s title, pregnant with irony and metaphysical implication, takes on more specific meaning as the name of a gay club.  The words ‘Grosse Freiheit’, in red neon over the entrance, confront Hans as he approaches the place.

    After walking through the bar, Hans stands with others watching a group of musicians, the climax to their performance a furious, frenzied saxophone solo.  He makes eye contact with another spectator before wandering off into a dungeon-like area where men, most of them naked, are making love to each other or, in a couple of cases, to themselves.  The spectacle is disorienting – sudden, unexpected and not straightforwardly interpretable.  Like the prison Hans has just emerged from, ‘Grosse Freiheit’ isn’t a wholly realistic place, at least if this is meant to be 1970:  the men drinking and chatting there have the look of a gay bar clientele at the other end of the decade.  So are the bowels of the club actually done out like a dungeon to reflect the prisons that homosexuals have occupied, either literally or metaphorically, until now?  Or is what’s on the screen what Hans specifically has become conditioned to see – sex between men inextricably linked to jail cells?  He doesn’t join in but returns to the bar and buys a packet of cigarettes from a machine.  He then exits the club.

    Franz Rogowski is doubly magnetic.  His distinctive facial bone structure and profile draw the camera.  The quiet, lisping voice makes you want to listen closely to him.  As previously noted (see review of Transit), Rogowski worked in contemporary dance before becoming an actor, and his face sometimes suggests a stage dancer’s mask.  This background may also be part of why his movement is so exceptionally expressive.  At times, Hans walks round the prison as if every footstep hurts, at others, in an almost lewd saunter.  Rogowski is admirably partnered by Georg Friedrich (whom I don’t recall seeing before).  He gives a masterly performance, from the moment Viktor first appears in the prison workshop and a wry light goes on in his eyes when they meet Hans’s.  It’s no surprise that the cinematographer Crystel Fournier’s palette stresses the unvarying bleakness of the prison yet Fournier manages to find tonal variety in the shadows and corners.  The prison soundtrack – of slamming doors and shouts, usually in the background – gets to you without being overdone.  It dominates the soundtrack but the sparingly used music – a melancholy refrain by Nils Petter Molvaer and Peter Brötzmann – is very effective.  I didn’t recognise the love song in French played in the gay bar’s catacombs and over the closing credits – probably too easy to label this haunting, but it is.

    Although Great Freedom has been praised in triumph-of-the-human-spirit terms, it’s darker and better than those platitudes imply.  Sebastian Meise brings off a difficult balancing act.  He shows gay men collectively as victims of a system but he and Franz Rogowski create a central character who, while shaped and arguably deformed by that system, is more than a victim.  Hans is an extraordinary recidivist.  Licentious but wanting companionship, he has been able to fulfil his needs more safely under lock and key.  The film feels slightly overlong but there may have been no way of avoiding that:  it has to stress the relentlessness of life inside in order to realise the process whereby Hans becomes inured – even addicted – to prison.  Following on from that phantasmal dungeon debauch, the film’s closing minutes describe the hero’s withdrawal symptoms matter of factly and to powerful effect.  When Hans buys that packet of cigarettes, is he thinking of Viktor, who asked, when Hans came out of prison on an earlier occasion, to send him smokes, which Hans failed to do?   Whatever may be in Hans’s mind, there’s no doubt as to what he does.  After leaving the club, he walks a little way down the street.  He breaks the window of a luxury goods store, setting off an alarm.  He sits down on the kerb in front of the store, lights up and waits patiently to be arrested.

    15 March 2022

    [1] Paragraph 175 was repealed in West Germany in 1969, one year after East Germany, two years after the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales, twelve and thirteen years before that happened in Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively.  Legalisation occurred after 1969 in Finland, Norway and Sebastian Meise’s native Austria.  (All details from Wikipedia.)

     

  • Ali & Ava

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clio Barnard (2021)

    Like all three of writer-director Clio Barnard’s previous features, Ali & Ava is set in her native Yorkshire.  Like its more successful predecessors, The Arbor (2010) and The Selfish Giant (2013), this new film is set in and on the outskirts of Bradford.  One of the title characters lives on a rough estate, Holme Wood; most of the houses seen in the course of the film are, whether viewed from the outside or inside, close-set.  The action sometimes moves, however, into more open spaces and the countryside beyond the city.  The look of Ali & Ava thus alternates between unyielding and lyrical, echoing the scheme of The Selfish Giant.  Perhaps to a greater extent than in that film, there’s also a correspondence here between the main visual qualities and those of the story being told, in which music plays an important part.  Clio Barnard may never repeat the formal innovations that gave The Arbor such impact but, of her films since, this latest is the most involving, though also the most dramatically conventional.

    Ava (Claire Rushbrook), fifty-something and of Irish descent, works as a classroom assistant but she’s primarily a mother:  she wears several rings but the one on her wedding finger declares MUM.  She has no partner but her four children and five grandchildren are all close at hand.  As well as her school-age youngest daughter Venice (Macy Shackleton), Ava’s current household also includes her son Callum (Shaun Thomas, who was Swifty in The Selfish Giant), his girlfriend (Tasha Connor) and their baby girl.  Fortyish Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a British Asian landlord who used to be a club DJ and liked it far more than collecting rents for his family’s properties.  He stores vinyl and turntables in the den where he now spends most of his time at home.  He’s married to Runa (Ellora Torchia) but they occupy different parts of the house and his wife intends to move out at the first opportunity.  Runa, who lost a baby, is now doing a university degree and her social life is with fellow students.  Ali hasn’t summoned the courage to tell his traditionalist family that the marriage is over.  What’s more, he’s persuaded Runa to keep up the pretence, on visits to Ali’s mother, that nothing is wrong.  Although he has no children of his own, Ali likes and gets on well with kids.  On his rent-collecting round, a tenant’s daughter, Sofia (Ariana Bodorova), won’t go to school.  Ali changes her mind by carrying her there on his shoulders, to Sofia’s laughing delight.  He first meets Ava when he comes to the school to drive Sofia home, as a favour to her mother.  Since it’s pouring with rain, he offers Ava a lift too.

    There’s one young character who doesn’t like Ali:  just seeing Ava get out of his car is enough to make her son’s hackles rise.  Callum, in his early twenties, may already be a parent himself but he’s mourning his own recently deceased father, Paul, whose fascist insignia decorate his room.  Callum has also inherited paternal bovver boots and a sword, which he brandishes when he finds his mother and Ava dancing on the sofa together.  During that first car journey, Ali asks Ava what kind of music she likes and she says country.  He doesn’t like the sound of that – what else?  Folk, she says.  That’s even worse, he replies, but she’s clearly tickled by his deadpan humour.  In time, Ali will make the effort to get into Bob Dylan in honour of Ava’s tastes (a nicely credible plot thread).  On an early visit to Ava’s house, though, he and she listen through headphones, connected to different iPods, to tracks Ali has put together to suit their respective preferences – until, that is, both selections play The Specials’ ‘(Dawning of a) New Era’.  This triggers the manic sofa dancing that Callum interrupts.  In a later sequence in Holme Wood, Ali wins round a gaggle of stone-throwing schoolkids by turning up his car stereo on a track by local hero MC Innes but Ava’s son is a persistently tougher nut to crack.  Ali tries to make light of the sword incident by referring to Callum (not to his face) as Zorro.  After learning more about his father’s extremism, Ali isn’t joking when he asks Ava, ‘If Paul was here, would he kick my head in?’  The silence in response is eloquent.

    As in her third feature, Dark River (2017), Barnard supplies one of her two main characters with more detail than the other but this time it’s the female lead.  We learn that Paul was also a wife-beater, who habitually ordered Ava to bring him the boots he liked wearing to lay into her.  He abused his stepdaughter, Michelle (Mona Goodwin), Ava’s eldest, for good measure.  A more surprising revelation is that, after she finally split with Paul, Ava decided to change her life and did a degree in criminology (!)  Even allowing that, as Michelle reminds her, Ava has made bad romantic choices in her time, it’s pushing it – and is designed purely to ratchet up domestic racial tension – that Michelle’s father was non-white and his successor a neo-Nazi.

    I wanted more of Ali’s family background, especially in view of the extraordinary secret he’s keeping from them.  A sequence in which his mother (Vinny Dhillon) shows Runa family photographs doesn’t ring true, for one of two reasons.  The way the scene is played gives the impression that Runa has never seen the photos before – hard to believe, given how many family gatherings she must have attended.  If Barnard means to suggest, rather, that the album is regularly brought out then Runa, at least, should somehow signal this, so that we see her reaction is part of the playing along that Ali asks of her.  A persisting problem is that it’s hard to see how their partnership ever worked.  Ali tells Ava that he got to know Runa in his DJ days and first noticed her because she was a great dancer.  You sense this information is supplied mainly to make clear theirs wasn’t an arranged marriage.

    The landscape cinematography – by Ole Bratt Birkeland, who shot The Arbor – is admirable.  Barnard’s choice of handheld camerawork for many indoor sequences is less successful:  the frenetic movement chimes only intermittently with the moods of characters in the frame.   The production design is by Stéphane Collonge, a Frenchman with a fine feel for English locale, whether town or country:  he also designed Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, as well as Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and its successor.  The odd-couple pairing at the centre of Ali & Ava is its chief strength, though.  The protagonists’ temperamental motors run at very different speeds and Barnard has cast the roles well to realise the contrast.  Ali is hyperactive.  As he tells Ava, he tends to go ‘from zero to seventy’ without pausing for breath; when his car’s stationary, he likes dancing to electro music on the roof rack.  Adeel Akhtar, emotionally nimble and eccentrically witty, is excellent:  he energises the whole film.  Claire Rushbrook’s Ava is altogether slower moving and Rushbrook is a less varied performer but she’s physically just right as a mother figure still hankering after being her own woman.  She has real warmth, especially in her eyes.

    It isn’t the fault of Shaun Thomas that Callum is insuperably problematic.  Barnard may mean us to see him as confused and hurting but that’s not how the character plays out.  It’s a retrospectively effective touch that, before his political leanings are revealed, Callum is seen happily dancing alongside Venice to a Bollyrobics routine they’re watching on television.  But his possessive attitude towards Ava and his hero worship of Paul are a queasy combination.  It’s faintly creepy when Callum sings a duet (‘Dirty Old Town’) with his mother on a family visit to a local bar.  We’re told that he doesn’t know what Paul did to Michelle; we’re not told that Callum was unaware of what Ava suffered at the hands – and feet – of his father.  As Runa, Ellora Torchia can’t rise above her weakly written role.  The more vivid Natalie Gavin is underused as Ava’s bi-polar friend and confidante.

    Ali and Ava’s tentative progress towards sleeping together – which they first do on a secret weekend away together – is well done.  Nervousness about what others might think, and what Callum does think, is compounded by a shared hesitancy deriving from the relationships each has already had.  Ava doesn’t want to make another mistake.  Ali hasn’t stopped loving Runa, though it’s now an unrequited love.  Despite this, the event that causes a rift between Ava and Ali – through a window, she sees him embracing his about-to-be-ex wife – is another element that feels contrived:  in a set-up like this, there has to be a rift in order for it to be healed.  The film does end effectively, though.   It’s pat that Callum, after belatedly learning what Paul did to Michelle, sloughs off his father’s legacy without further ado but his mother’s second thoughts about giving up on Ali are more convincing.  Shortly after they meet, they go one evening to a stretch of ground looking out on the moors above Bradford.  Ali tells Ava he comes to the same spot whenever it’s a new moon, to think about his late father.  It’s that time of the month again.  Ava knows where Ali will be, she joins him there, they look at each other, and that’s it.  The story simply stops, without a sense that the couple’s difficulties are resolved or their future secure.  But Clio Barnard leaves her principals and her audience hoping for the best.

    11 March 2022

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