Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Dir: Mathias Glasner

Dir: Mathias Glasner.

Matthias Glasner has taken an enormous risk by making a film on the theme of rape and concentrating on the perpetrator's character and motivation as the subject. Slightly overlong, but not without justification, 'The Free Will' is a considerable dramatic success. Whether that will translate into box office sales, or international tv screenings is another issue, because this is a film that holds nothing back and opens with a horrific sequence, as a young woman is brutally attacked and raped. The memory of that scene underpins every sequence of the film, as the audience uneasily awaits a second depiction of male violence.

Juergen Vogel plays a man who has attacked women and spent years in a psychiatric hospital before being released into the community. His rehabilitation has been a step by step process, but no-one apart from the man himself seems unduly concerned about the possibility that he will re-offend. His return to freedom begins with a place in a sheltered community, under the less than watchful eye of an indolent social worker, who fixes him up with a job at a printers. He begins a romance with the owner's daughter (Sabine Timoteo), herself a repressed and awkward young woman. Their relationship is a halting and uncertain affair, but they eventually share a flat and look like building a future together.

Because their story is told with precision and depicted with great perception, Glasner manages to touch the heart of the matter. The assumption behind psychiatric care, rather than incarceration, is that even if the patient cannot be cured of their ills, at least they can be brought to a condition where their situation is manageable and they are no longer a risk to others. That tension and the possibility of reoffending, is a constant pressure in every encounter the man has with women. This is much more than than the risk that he will be forced to return to the institution without further hope of release, but as we have already witnessed, a real and persistent danger to women. Vogel plays the psychopath as a quiet self aware man, who recognised the symptoms of his own psychosis and handles himself with caution and restraint, his objective, not merely to preserve his freedom, but also to repress and hopefully transform his hatred of women. It is clear that the fine-line between continuing success and complete disaster will dog him until the end of his days. It is also clear that this risk is one that psychiatrists handling psychotic patients also accept. 'The Free Will' is the story of a man who is completely trapped. The contradiction between this everyday rationality and his potential for irrational behaviour is a framework that defines every moment of his experience, a dilemma that Glasner has captured for the cinema and would make this film a powerful presence in any Festival programme.