Any early concern that the movie is about to turn into a sort of gay Austrian prison version of "Green Book," about a bigot who reforms after spending time with a saintly representative of The Other, fades when you get to know the men and see how they act towards each other and their environment. Viktor and Hans use their shared dexterity with, and access to, needles (Viktor is junkie, while Hans works in the prison sweatshop) to contrive a homemade tattoo kit that Viktor uses to crudely obliterate Hans' concentration camp numbers. Their team-up in hiding evidence of this act of decency bonds them, putting them in cahoots against prison guards who are determined to punish any display of individuality or basic empathy by beating prisoners with truncheons and locking them away in solitary confinement (a misery conveyed by briefly plunging viewers into absolute darkness, which is surely more powerful in a movie theater than at home where you're surrounded by reminders that at least you the viewer are okay).
The film's other major relationship, between Hans and a younger inmate, Leo (Anton von Lucke), is just as affecting though considerably less fraught, at times getting close to a flat-out romantic love story that just happens to occur in one of the worst places imaginable. It's in these scenes that "Great Freedom" is at its most imaginative, showing how the men acknowledge and communicate their desire for each other and act on it in ways that will satisfy their need for sex and partnership while minimizing the chance that the authorities will catch on. The incarcerated person's acquired skill at sending coded messages and finding secret spaces to be free is shown in furtive conversations, the concoction and hatching of plans, and fleeting instants of bliss that are all the more inspiring for having been devised in a man-made Hell.
Through it all, Rogowski is the audience's guide and surrogate, sometimes a terrified newbie and other times a wizened lifer, always seeming to accept the day-to-day and try to find peace and love in it, despite the constant reminders that Hans' body belongs to the state. Even when he finds a way to put it to his own uses, the resulting moments of happiness are taking place on borrowed time.
It's not easy to put across the energy that Rogowski does here (basically, battered but indestructible childlike innocence and pure romantic longing) without going soggy and corny. How does he do it? Mainly by never doing more than he needs to in order to communicate what we need to know. Rogowski makes the audience come to him, but never seems coy or withholding.
That the viewer can fully comprehend every aspect of Hans' complex psychology after having made only minimal effort syncs up nicely with the main message of Hans and Viktor's relationship, which is that you don't have to try all that hard to find common ground with another person, no matter how seemingly alien to your own sensibilities. You need only recognize them as a fellow human being who's doing the best they can, one day at a time.
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