Review: A persecuted gay man finds true liberation in beautifully bittersweet ‘Great Freedom’

A movie that each treasures the life span of a lit match and respects the endurance it takes to endure a jail time period, “Nice Freedom” makes an beautiful case for the impossibility of caging the guts, even when love itself is criminalized.

Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise’s ticking clock of a drama — regrettably lacking from the Oscar nominees this yr for worldwide characteristic — crisscrosses the repeated imprisonments of a homosexual German man performed by Franz Rogowski between the top of World Battle II and the emergence of a brand new homosexual outspokenness within the late ’60s. In that span of time, to be gay was to nonetheless really feel shackled to the persecution nightmare of Hitler’s reign, as a result of whereas the German penal code provision that jailed homosexual males — Paragraph 175 — was handed in 1871, and noticed its most brutal prosecution through the Nazi years, it stayed on the books for many years after the conflict.

It’s 1968 once we meet Hans (Rogowski), who appears to be like unfazed at being tried and sentenced for having intercourse with males. We are able to sense his familiarity with life behind bars: He’s offhandedly acclimated to the processing examination routine, he’s a whiz on the jail stitching machines, and he is aware of one inmate — a burly convicted assassin named Viktor (Georg Friedrich) — properly sufficient to have a teasing “miss me” alternate. He’s additionally prepared to guard a good-looking younger schoolteacher (Anton von Lucke) he acknowledges from the shabby public restroom the place they have been caught.

The actual sort of jail arduous case Hans is, although, is signaled by the primary flashback, which presents up the psychological window framing the entire film’s portrait of identification and adaptation. When the narrative shifts to 1945 by the use of a transition Meise makes use of all through — confinement’s pitch-blackness — we discover Hans a youthful inmate but scrawnier and sicklier, the mark of time spent in a focus camp. When his cell door is opened to disclose an American soldier, we study that Hans just isn’t going free, nevertheless, however relatively being despatched to a jail to serve out the remainder of his Paragraph 175 conviction.

That surprising actuality for homosexual males from the camps — that the Allied liberation didn’t embrace them — is what spurred Meise and co-screenwriter Thomas Reider to write down “Nice Freedom.” However in lieu of some predictably depressing historic drama, they’ve crafted an unusually tender, even emboldening story of resilience and love in a chilly, dehumanizing area. Within the attentive, textured camerawork of Crystel Fournier — pictures one may think incomes the admiration of Jean Genet — the movie spotlights Hans’ perseverance in countering institutionalized injustice with what his coronary heart tells him to be, and what he must do to facilitate ardour. (Hans’ manipulation of jail guidelines to conjure in a single day “dates” is the closest I’ve seen a jail drama get to feeling romantic.)

The wiry, magnetic Rogowski — whose eyes are their very own world — has already made a reputation for himself in compelling turns for Michael Haneke (“Glad Finish”) and Christian Petzold (“Transit,” “Undine”). Right here he powerfully conveys 25 years of an ostracized, rebellious soul, somebody whose sensitivity and need are survival instruments, not weaknesses — methods to all the time really feel human. One of many movie’s arcs is how he slowly breaks down Viktor’s homophobia through the years — a mild marketing campaign of caring that goes again to their assembly as cellmates in 1945 and that Friedrich’s portrayal matches in steeliness and vulnerability. Their scenes remind us why motion pictures are so wealthy a storytelling artwork: We are able to see time collapsed into delicate, typically overt but fantastically weighted gestures of connection, moments that collect in that means.

When “Nice Freedom” finally depicts literal liberty, within the wake of Germany’s partial repealing of the regulation, Hans is confronted with what males like him sacrificed for, and Meise’s epilogue is believably bittersweet about that influence. However what resonates is being left seeing Hans the way in which he sees himself, why he might transcend the brutality of any unjust regulation: Life for him just isn’t marked in jail sentences however in time spent nurturing love he knew was true freedom.