It’s hard to write about films at a time when the world is violently imploding. But while watching and listening to Putin try to murderously recreate his empire, and looking at homegrown media demagogues like Tucker Carlson offer him traitorous support while Trump provides outrageous and inane praise for Putin’s “genius” political model, I still took time to watch a couple of fine films.
Neither film was escapist in nature; neither makes the dark reality of our daily lives disappear. One of the two, “Playground,” the Belgian director Laura Wandel’s stunning debut film, is playing at New York’s Film Forum now. It centers on two siblings, a boy of nine, Abel (Günter Duret), and his sensitive first-grader sister, Nora (Maya Vanderbeque), who are attending the school for the first time.
The film is powerfully immersive, shot from Nora’s point of view on a child’s eye level. It places us in Nora’s small universe — a hard place to be, where rejection alternates with acceptance, and the nature of friendships continues to shift. We get many closeups of Nora’s animated face, and her reactions to the world she observes and with which she interacts.
The film’s point of view limits what we can perceive, but Vanderbeque conveys a fantastic range of emotion, projecting her anxieties, fears, anger, and profound empathy for her brother Abel, who is being brutally bullied — and later shifts to bullying a smaller boy. In fact, being a victim and victimizer is an integral part of life for many of the children in school and on the playground. The film avoids any false or sentimental notes, staying connected throughout to what is emotionally true and revelatory.
The other film, “Great Freedom,” opens March 4th at the Film Forum. It’s a German/Austrian co-production directed by Sebastian Meise, and the gifted Franz Rogowski plays the film’s central figure, Hans Hoffman.
The humane Hans goes in and out of prison for engaging in homosexual acts during three post war periods from 1945–1968. (West Germany inexplicably criminalized homosexual behavior until 1994.) Hans had also been in a Nazi concentration camp during the war for being a homosexual, so the specter of the Holocaust is present through this film.
Hans is one of a group of prisoners who dared to live according to their desires, only to be imprisoned for it. “Great Freedom” is a powerful political statement against state repression of what was once considered deviant and criminal behavior, treated here without a touch of prurience or sentimentality. In addition, the film is a character study of Hans, a good and vulnerable man, who becomes an almost permanent prisoner because of his sexual desires and unwillingness to bow to the state.
The film uses deep shadows to capture some of the intimacy that Hans creates in these stark surroundings. The most significant of them is with Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a man serving a life sentence for murder and, at the beginning, a raging homophobe. With the passage of time, they share moments of need, and even affection. There is nothing virtuosic about the film’s direction, but a humane intelligence is at work that looks at the past, and queer history, with a clear eye.
I am grateful that we have theaters in New York like the Film Forum, where movies of this nature can receive a first run. The films may not allow me to forget the image of a nuclear-brandishing Putin threatening us all, but they grant us ways of seeing the world and the self in more complex and nuanced ways.
