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.)
