This review appeared in the April 2022 issue of Sight & Sound and is reprinted here with permission.
Sebastiane Meise’s film about gay incarceration in postwar Germany finds the value of holding and being held tight when it counts.
In the opening scene of Great Freedom – Sebastian Meise’s feature set against the continued criminalisation of gay sex in Germany following the war – the camera hovers and whirrs behind a barrier, its view of the public toilet in which men are cruising, wanking, sucking and fucking partly obscured. The literal inference is of police surveillance, the surreptitious gathering of evidence to support the incarceration of a pathologised minority. Less literally, the set-up evokes the view from a hide: the perspective of a hunter preparing to kill for sport. The film has few moments of overt homophobic violence but its entire milieu is that of a society, within or without prison walls, in which queer lives are viewed as suspect, pathetic or disposable, yet remain capable of generating peculiar pleasures and comforts as well as often, though not always, enduring contingent pains.
Meise’s previous works have focused on particularly taboo and sensitive areas of sexuality. The 2011 feature Still Life concerned a father’s use of sex workers to play out his desire for his daughter while the 2012 documentary Outing interviewed a paedophile on camera about his urges. In Great Freedom, empathy for the protagonist should be more easily come by, at least today. Its central figure is Hans Hoffmann (Franz Rogowski), one of the men from the cottage. That opening scene is set in 1968 and Hans gets two years for his activities, as does the younger Leo (Anton von Lucke). Inside, the pair experiment with ways to try to be together and Hans also reunites with Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a lifer with whom, we discover through flashbacks, he previously shared jailtime in 1945 and again in 1957.
The legal context for all this is Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175, the homophobic 1871 measure against which pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld unsuccessfully campaigned. It was retained by both the Nazis and the post-war federal republic, with Allied backing, seeing people like Hans unceremoniously transferred from concentration camps to prison. “Echt?” grunts Viktor on hearing this. For real? Amended in 1969, it remained on the books until 1994, thousands of lives blighted along the way.
The cottaging set-up brings to mind Frank Riploh’s unblushingly up-front Taxi zum Klo (1981), a feature film that stakes a potent claim to the real through its naturalistic exploration of day-to-day gay life in West Germany. But Great Freedom’s non-linear chronology, and its being set almost entirely inside the same prison, leave its characters suspended in a distinctive kind of carceral time apart from the everyday world.
In queer storytelling terms, this can’t help but evoke Jean Genet. As in Un chant d’amour, a straw proves helpful as a means of connection, here being used not to blow smoke between cells but to poke holes in a Bible as a clandestine form of communication. There’s attention to the romantic uses of self-incrimination and self-sabotage, the useful slippages within disciplinary regimes and the oblique intimacies of activities such as tattooing, with its grasped limbs, punctured skin and wiped spit. The prison here is no erotic fantasia, though. It’s not shown as a particularly sexualised environment and both Rogowski’s compelling performance and Crystel Fournier’s crisp photography maintain a straightforward clarity rather than a heady intoxication.
Through this matter-of-fact mode, Meise’s film builds substantial potency. The sense emerges through Rogowski’s sympathetic, trapped Hans of a life without good options. The public space of the cottage and the surreptitiously shared spaces of the prison are fraught with the risk of observation and exposure. Yet fragmentary glimpses of an attempted shared private domestic life with another partner, Oskar (Thomas Prenn), frame this as a doomed aspiration too. Bucolic 16mm-style footage of a day at a lake highlights both the precious fragility of any such intimate archive and the high stakes of documenting outlaw affection.
The most moving kind of love seems to develop incrementally between Hans and Viktor, less a gay pairing than a bond that suggests the incapacity of rigid, binary identity categories to account for the nuanced shades of human mutuality. Friedrich’s Viktor is canny and blunt but not cruel or dumb. Together over time, through punishment and humiliation, addiction and grief, assistance and care, they come to model the inestimable value of holding and being held tight when it counts.
