Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing. Perhaps he sees their resemblance to prison, whose interiors themselves resemble the public lavatories where Hans broke the law, that prison to which lifer Hans had an institutionalised loyalty, part of the lost generations of gay men whose entire lives were pointlessly consumed. Hans, recently out of jail for this crime, wanders the subterranean sex-filled corridors with an unfathomable smile. It is 1969, just after the West German government has decriminalised gay sex. It is visited by Hans, to whom 36-year-old German actor Franz Rogowski brings his typically intense, coiled and opaque personality.
G rosse Freiheit (Great Freedom) is the name of the Fassbinder-ish gay bar in this film with a dungeon-style sex club beneath: director and co-writer Sebastian Meise leaves it to us to gauge the exact level of irony in his title.
