A quasi-relaxed look, a gaze never frightened, even when undressing in front of prison guards: one senses habit, even routine, in Hans’s (Franz Rogowski) approach when he arrives in these places which, in 1968, exude sadness and the ravages of time.
This introduction eloquently illustrates the almost fusional relationship that the prisoner maintains with this universe, a revelation in three stages in Great Freedomby Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise (stilleben). We still know why he is deprived of his liberty: he was unknowingly filmed in a public toilet by West German police authorities, footage used to lock up those whom the state calls “perverts”. , a process endorsed by the infamous paragraph 175 of the German Civil Code. Hans is the tragic figure, and this, from 1945.
Sebastian Meise establishes an astonishing temporal back and forth, then bringing us back to the sad aftermath of the Second World War, always in the same place, where the accent of American soldiers resounds. Hans is younger there, but bruised to the bone, barely out of a concentration camp, he who then had to wear the pink triangle. At first put off by the idea of sharing his cell with him, Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a colossus with feet of clay, will end up accepting him to the point of putting a tattoo on his arm to camouflage the figures of shame. .
This relationship, sometimes complicit, sometimes stormy, constitutes the Ariadne’s thread of his prolonged sentences. In 1968 as in 1957, another pivotal moment, Hans was able to feed on illusions by cultivating impossible loves, the first with Oskar (Thomas Prenn), a euphoric relationship, but with a tragic flavor, and the second with Leo (Anton von Lucke ), shortly before the shelving of paragraph 175 in 1969. The old accustomed to the bars will even be ready to lie to save this timorous young musician from social decline.
In this oppressive universe, time appears petrified, firstly because the camera practically never leaves the scene, the outside world being virtually absent, apart from a few echoes, including those of a firework . In the midst of this misery, Hans looks like a blank page, a taciturn being with an incandescent gaze, of whom we will know practically nothing, except his ingenuity in circumventing the rules, in seducing despite the dangers. This austere and opaque posture is reminiscent of that of Margarethe von Trotta (The years lead, Rosa Luxemburg) to another era, illustrating the dark side of a newly free society, but still a prisoner of its demons and intolerances.
In a spare style that owes a lot to the sharp gaze of French cinematographer Crystel Fournier and to the filmmaker’s assumed refusal of grandiloquence — forget the solicitous postures of the traditional prison film —, Great Freedomdwells on the details of a joyless daily life on the camouflaged horizon. The mysteries that surround him do not make Hans a revolutionary figure, a fierce opponent of the ambient hypocrisy, but his very presence and his never repressed desires represent a threat.
Sebastian Meise could not find a better double than Franz Rogowski, a rigorous actor with exemplary choices (Victoria, Undine, Transit, A hidden life). With admirable abandon, immersed in glaucous atmospheres – the scenes in solitary confinement give chills to the back – he bowed to the visions of a filmmaker never prisoner of clichés, concluding the trajectory of this improbable hero with a sense of irony that would have pleased Fassbinder.