Great Freedom
Talk about the love that dare not speak its name (to quote Oscar Wilde), Great Freedom (Große Freiheit in the original German) has a monumental love story at its centre but isn’t quite sure about expressing it. The whole film operates like this, sideways, backwards, though it starts straightforwardly enough with some footage from a camera hidden in a men’s public toilet, where Hans (Franz Rogowski) is caught indulging in a series of same-sex encounters of a salty kind, with whoever happens to be passing. The footage is part of evidence in Hans’s trial for crimes against decency and he’s soon in jail. It’s 1968, homosexuality as a crime is about to be … Read more