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Great Freedom Movie Review

Great Freedom is a 2021 Austrian drama film directed by Sebastian Meise and starring Franz Rogowski and Georg Friedrich. It is one of the most underrated foreign films of the year.

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“Did you miss me so bad?“

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In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Over the decades, he develops an unlikely bond with his cellmate Viktor. There have been many prison dramas in the last couple of decades, but rare are those that are as nuanced and as powerful as this movie.

Featuring an issue that is for some unbeknownst reason rarely explored in cinema, the film truthfully depicts how tragic living as a gay man was during the first half of the twentieth century. After WWII, everybody was released from prison except for gay men who had to endure continued imprisonment. The film cleverly depicts the ridiculousness of this law by showcasing the gay prisoners as being good-natured and tame, clearly not belonging to the prison that houses actual law-breakers including murderers.

Hans Hoffmann is played so powerfully by Franz Rogowski in what is a tour de force performance. The make-up team did a lot to make his scenes set in the future more believable and the actor delivered terrific work as this very calm, broken man. Georg Friedrich is also excellent as his Nazi roommate whose sexuality is refreshingly ambiguous. He may be bisexual or gay, but he also may be just straight, but the two start a very interesting relationship that is both complex and believably animalistic in the context of this setting.

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Great Freedom is one of those minimalist, subdued movies that are all about showing and not telling, ultimately making it a cinematic powerhouse that is best seen on the big screen and I am sad that I did not watch it like that. Not only is the dialogue sparse, but the attention to detail is remarkable and each scene is either powerfully subtle in execution or intriguingly ambiguous depending on the situation.

And there are so many instantly memorable, incredible moments interspersed throughout this movie’s runtime. One is that deeply tragic, incredible scene that features Hans leaving a letter to his previous boyfriend in another cell and he does that by poking holes in Bible. There are so many of these moments that emphasize on the power of human resistance and our need to emotionally connect with others no matter the cost.

Another highlight is the ending. Hans is finally released from prison, but after going to an underground gay place where everybody engages in sex with strangers, he chooses to rob a store and go to prison once again. This exemplifies that forceful ambiguity that permeates the entire story.

This sequence can be understood in a couple of different ways: either past prisoners can never fully adapt to the outside world again, the lack of thrills of forbidden love is gone now or he’s seen the futility of the gay sex experience on the streets and he wants a real connection that he already has in prison. The protagonist wants to find romance even in this darkest of places and that makes him such a tragic figure.

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However you choose to interpret the ending, it is unforgettable. Great Freedom doesn’t have the strongest technical aspects, but a couple of shots at cigarette matching in darkness and a terrific grasp of the prison setting elevate the material at hand. The directing is also confident and the writing is fantastic. The film also flows well and is consistently both engaging and highly emotional. The editing is only serviceable as I could initially not follow the time jumps particularly well, but eventually the movie became defter even in that department.