[7]

A police cadet (Hanno Koffler) nervously begins an affair with a fellow officer-in-training (Max Riemelt), throwing his marriage into disarray and inviting scorn from both his family and the police force. Gay dramas tend to be didactic and end in tragedy, and while this offering from Germany doesn’t fully avoid those pitfalls, it turns out to be better than most others of its kind. Koffler does a solid job portraying the fear and anxiety of his character. Riemelt’s part is more one-dimensional than I’d have liked — he does a lot of questionable things, acting more as an overt plot device than a fully-fleshed out role. The nature of Koffler’s marriage and his relationship with his wife (Katharina Schüttler) is kept a bit cloudy as well. When dealing with a protagonist who commits adultery, the less you know about the wife and the other ‘woman’, the better, perhaps? Despite the over-simplified supporting characters, Free Fall is an interesting character study of a man who weathers the consequences after stepping outside the rigid boundaries of monogamy and heteronormativity.