How Great Freedom expresses slight moments of empathy and a sense of humanism amongst the prison milieu is beautifully rendered throughout this impressive film. The smallest acts or gestures of kindness offer a reprieve from the hopelessness but also serve as revelatory moments that encapsulate the human spirit's penchant for good when detached from societal conditioning often based on a give-and-take type understanding of the social order. Dramatic implications are largely understated but still rapturously felt throughout Great Freedom, a film that at its best reaches for something more existential in its examinations of connection, detailing through this powerful story how our ability to confide in each other and freely accept our commonalities as beings is a mighty force against the darkness, pain, and despair that is so commonplace in the world. Through the central relationship of this story, Great Freedom manages to detach corporeal desire from what it means to love, in effect expanding its reach beyond a story of heteronormative societal expectations and suppression, reaching towards something detached from all identifiers or descriptors and towards simply the primal need we all have as social creatures. Featuring an elliptical narrative structure that temporally oscillates between various time periods, Great Freedom manages to be expansive yet intimate, never obscuring the film's dramatic resolve while effectively expressing the cold, hard reality of stasis and the perpetual state of despair and carceral violence placed on these men. The abhorrent legality in which homosexuals were outlawed and imprisoned is platformed and examined but Great Freedom in some respects manages to transcend this specific struggle reaching towards something even more universal, detailing in its denouement how meaningful relationships whether platonic or intimate are built on the mutual understanding that provides us with a sense of comfort and individual resolve from the great unknown.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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