Great Freedom

Directed by Sebastian Meise

Running time: 1hr56 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Franz Rogowski and Georg Friedrich star in Great Freedom

If you've seen such films as Christian Petzold's Transit and Sebastian Schipper's Victoria, you'll already know that German actor Franz Rogowski has one of the great faces in contemporary cinema. Both boyish and old-souled, starkly handsome and gently askew, it somehow invites you both to look after him and to gaze upon him from a respectful distance. That extraordinary face does a lot of heavy lifting in Sebastian Meise's exquisite queer prison drama Great Freedom: weathered and variously moustachioed across the film's three-decade timeline, it bears the growing fatigue of constant criminal persecution for no crime at all — under Paragraph 175, the German statute that made homosexual activity between two men illegal for most of the 20th century.

In the eyes of the law, then, harmless, mild-mannered Hans (Rogowski) is a repeat offender: released after the Second World War from a Nazi concentration camp directly into prison, he spends the next thirty-odd years circling back to the same penitentiary, each stint behind bars making him no less gay than he was before. His trajectory stands in contrast to the lifelong confinement of convicted murderer Viktor (Georg Friedrich), with whom he is repeatedly paired as a cellmate — as over the years, the homophobic killer's disgust at having to share space with this real reprobate mellows and shifts and evolves into a form of empathy, and a strange kind of not-quite love story blooms from their understanding.

Nothing happens entirely straightforwardly in Great Freedom, least of all the march of time itself — Meise's knotty, intricate story structure weaves and darts and wormholes irregularly between the 1940s and the 1970s, denoting both seismic social change in the post-war years and the clock-stopping stasis of prison life away from the forward-charging outside world. It's historically fascinating but all too resonant in the present day, where gay rights in many territories are being sneakily rolled back, like an unspoken extension of the film's elastic, expansive chronology. And with Rogowski as our human anchor in this tumult, it's deeply and richly moving: wisely deciding against cheesy ageing makeup and prosthetics, Meise and his star instead let the face convey from within the cumulative burden of exhaustion and anger — and fleeting joy as well, as Hans eventually shapes freedom on his own terms.

GREAT FREEDOM (2021) Written by Sebastian Meise, Thomas Reider | Shot by Crystel Fournier | Edited by Joana Scrinzi