A new German film favors true liberation over sanitized progressive politics.
Rewriting the past — usually dramatizing social victimhood — is how filmmaking progressives intimidate and manipulate the present. In Great Freedom, director Sebastian Meise draws attention to gay men incarcerated under the infamous Paragraph 175 “deviancy” clause of Germany’s penal code (abolished in 1994). As Germany’s submission for this year’s Best International Film Oscar, it resists progressive conventions and is the best of the bunch.
The film observes the ordeal of career prisoner Hans Hoffman (played by Franz Rogowski) through three time periods: 1945, 1957, and 1978. But better than today’s routine progressive history lessons (Moonlight, The Power of the Dog, The Hate You Give, etc.), Great Freedom explores each decade through verboten visual eroticism. During Hans’s serial, recidivist imprisonment, he is seen at the center of the government’s entrapment practices — surveillance of public spaces (1978), wartime concentration-camp oppression (1945), and then as the maker of his own personal, secret erotic memorabilia (1957).
Hoffman’s storyline happens out of sequence because Meise tells more than the history of oppression. Great Freedom is conceived as a reorganized history of homosexual consciousness. That makes it a fascinating corrective to contemporary gay politics, such as the way mainstream media sell Pete Buttigieg’s speciously idealized progressive gay image. (Buttigieg himself uses the Obamaesque word “anodyne.”) Meise goes back to the character of gay experience before it was a sanitized political tool.
By its very title, Great Freedom challenges today’s “Love Wins” movement by recounting the lost radicalism of the gay-liberation struggle when personal sexual liberty was prized above conformity. It doesn’t anticipate legalized domestic partnership, and it complicates the attainment of political power to force social change.
Typically, films such as the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet contrast contemporary progressive gay attitudes to bygone oppressive Hollywood. Great Freedom is more like Mark Rappaport’s The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (1997), which cataloged the historical evolution of gay cinematic expression. Meise continues that endeavor through imaginative re-creations of past filmmaking: The opening “Observation II” scenes, reenacting government surveillance footage, feature subtle camera movement that suggests the involvement of voyeuristic prurience. It’s an advance over the squeamish Freddie Mercury sex antics in Bohemian Rhapsody, and it specifically recalls the Frank Ripploh film Taxi zum Klo, a German porn-to-art breakthrough at the 1981 New York Film Festival.
Meise symbolizes Han’s concentration-camp liberation through the figure of a black American GI (reference to a Rainer Werner Fassbinder fetish) and then symbolizes Germany’s reunification as prisoner Hans goes from manufacturing pink bedsheets to sewing brown prison sheets and repurposing Nazi uniforms. Prison provides the setting for Great Freedom’s sexual-oppression motifs, reflecting the legendary Jean Genet–Jean Cocteau collaboration Un chant d’amour, a film the Moonlight generation knows nothing about but that Meise relates to for its individual morality — a lost idea in this era of fatuous political conformity.
What holds Meise’s experimental film together is Franz Rogowski’s portrayal of Hans’s sexual development. Rogowski uncannily resembles the dark-haired, mustachioed clone image of Taxi zum Klo’s forgotten auteur, Frank Ripploh, but he is also a squeezed-face Joaquin Phoenix type (although his libidinous walk through the prison yard recalls Sean Penn’s swagger). Phoenix’s Joker was a real deviant; Rogowski makes Hans a dissatisfied lover and nonconforming irredeemable — countering the millennium’s anodyne Buttigieg progressive. The subplot of Hans’s long relationship with a heterosexual prison drug addict, Viktor (Georg Friedrich), centers on a daring reunion scene where Hans reveals what he really missed. Rogowski characterizes the three ages of gay male adjustment from victimhood to romantic to self-sufficiency.
In Great Freedom’s climax, Hans cruises the catacombs of a gay jazz bar, an underground reminder of the prison lifestyle he defied but also eroticized. This is the key to Meise’s approach. It is not selling social rebellion (though Film Forum promotes the film that way) but is centered on Hans’s romantic drive: making Braille-like punctures over Bible verses for a coded Genet-like love letter, then his 8mm home movie of a day on the lake with idealized lover Oskar (Thomas Prenn). Is it a memory or an actual cultural relic?
Meise’s images contest the progressive practice of rewriting history. He knows it risks rewriting truth and morality. Great Freedom’s unexpected view of Hans’s personal freedom is preferable to movies that teach Gen Z that gays are always oppressed. Once again, a European filmmaker shows Americans how it should be done.
