Great Freedom Review: The Ties That Bind

Jean Genet’s 1950 short masterpiece Un Chant D’Amour remains a revolutionary depiction of desire and emancipation, of two incarcerated men learning how to make love, or something like it, through the wall that separates them. They use cigarette smoke, flowers, the very texture of the thick, soot-covered barrier between them, but mostly their imagination to catapult themselves out of imprisonment and misery. Certain forms of ecstasy have that power, Genet’s film suggests. They can numb the body, even transport it.

A similar scenario plays out in Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom, only it arrives at a more pessimistic view. Here, the frenzy of carnal communion, real or imagined, makes the body leave one carceral hell for another. The film centers on Hans (Franz Rogowski), a Jewish man living in post-war Germany who goes from a concentration camp straight to prison for engaging in homosexual acts in a public bathroom. Throughout, we follow his many stints in that prison, and the film sees his recidivism as an addiction-like symptom of his desires.

Great Freedom implies as much by it pairing Hans with a junkie cellmate, Viktor (Georg Friedrich), who develops a visceral relationship with Hans over the course of decades after being initial repulsed by his sexuality. The film, fortunately, never insists on an equivalence between drug dependence and gay sex. It simply evokes a common link between Hans and Viktor around the question of unescapable patterns. These repetitions are embodied by the structure of the film itself, as it moves back and forth in time, suggesting that life is scripted in such a way that the downtrodden will forever be trapped in a no-exit labyrinth.

Those repetitions appear in the form of carceral rituals, as in the prisoners’ courtyard games, the distribution of food, and the nocturnal checkups. They’re also evident in the cravings that Hans and Viktor cannot repress—no matter how dangerous the consequences may be. Cravings for dope, for love, for an occasional blowjob through the hole in a prison door, and, of course, for freedom. But for the absence of freedom, too, it turns out. In one way or another, these strange bedfellows seem united by their dread of the world beyond the prison’s walls.

Meise depicts the prison in a way rarely seen in cinema. He allows love of all sorts to emerge form a space architected for surveillance and violence. We see this in Hans and Viktor’s relationship, which transitions from the hostile to a place of brotherly love, as well as in the romantic love that Hans directs at the beautiful and young gay men who also cannot help but return to the prison time and time again. We could even say that it’s Hans’s ability to still dream of romantic love, to find fertile ground for it despite the bareness of carceral space, that keeps him alive—unlike others in his position for whom incarceration proves to be lethal.

In the film, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is. Love, like gay sex, finds a crack to slip through and manifest itself. It upends the intended purpose of a prison’s hyper-controlled openings—turning, for instance, Judas-holes into glory holes. Great Freedom sees gay sex and love, too, as critical weapons for emotional and institutional survival, enacting themselves through a kiss, a public embrace to soothe a weeping other, and the tattoo that covers up the evidence of genocide.