GROSSE FREIHEIT/ GREAT FREEDOM
Germany, 2021, 116 minutes, Colour.
Franz Rogowski, Georg Friedrich.
Directed by Sebastian Meise.
The freedom focus for this sombre drama is the history of legislation concerning homosexuality, especially in Germany.
The film opens with 16mm film being projected, a toilet, a “cottage”, frequented by men for pickups and sexual activity. It is being screened at the case against Hans Hoffman (a powerful performance by Franz Rogowski) who is condemned to jail. It is 1968. And the number of the legislation, 175, is prominent in the prison to indicate the reasons for the prisoner being in jail.
The film goes through the usual processes, humiliating of the prisoner, stripped and search, prison clothes, the cell. Hans is placed in a cell with Victor, homophobic, tough – but the plot revealing that they have been several times in prison together, beginning in 1945.
The action goes back to the prison in 1945, Hans being released from a concentration camp where he was interned because he was homosexual, liberated by the Americans but nevertheless sentenced to continue his term in prison by the Allies. Later the film will move to 1957, the indication being that Hans is in and out of jail, and, once again, he encounters Victor.
1945 sees the young Hans, the experience of the concentration camp, a number on his arm which Victor, despite his homophobia, offers to blot out with tattoo ink. There is a bond between the two. Victor works in the kitchen, bringing meals around to the various cells. Hans has a talent for sewing which is his occupation each time he is in jail.
In 1957, Hans encounters a friend, Oscar, and tries to make contact with him, using a Bible in which he pricks points which, when held to the light, contain a message. Victor, initially unwilling, taking the meals around, eventually, curiously, persuades Hans to fellate him. He then delivers the message to Oscar. However, after the two meet, love for each other, Oscar works on the roof, kills himself by throwing himself from the roof.
In 1968-69, there is a young teacher and mutual attraction between him and Hans, Hans arranging that they defy some regulations for identification at night and are relegated to a common cell where they have a sexual experience. Hans is sorry for the teacher, makes a declaration that he approached the teacher for forcible sexual activity – and the teacher is freed.
In the meantime, Victor is in his usual occupation, a drug addict, eventually revealing the story of why he is in prison, a murder of a woman, the possibility of his going on parole but showing his innate fear and his drugging himself instead of going into the hearing.
1969, the prisoners watched the moon landing. Hans sees the front page of the newspaper with the information that 175 has been repealed. Which means that he leaves prison, leaving Victor in prison, and goes to a gay club, Great Freedom, experiencing the change for his life and his legal status as homosexual.
In some ways, the serious film is semi-documentary, a portrayal of life in prison without conventional sensationalism, the experience of prisoners, especially solitary confinement (with a number of sequences just filmed in blackness as Hans is put in solitary, darkness, some matches and flame, just the sounds in the darkness).
