Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Das Leben der Anderen) A
Germany (137 mi) 2006 d:
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
A brilliantly realized depiction of the East German Stasi
secret police, set in the mid 1980’s when they were in full swing, casting
their net of surveillance over the entire nation, sadistically turning neighbor
against neighbor, all under the thumb of an information hungry police state,
where all choices were impossible, where for an entire nation there was no
option, as failure to cooperate with the authorities usually meant dire
consequences. This is a revival of
Kieslowski’s behind the iron curtain cinema of moral anxiety, and in many ways
parallels his 1988 film, A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), as in this case,
instead of an ordinary citizen spying on his attractive neighbor, it is one of
the highest Stasi agents bugging the home apartment of one of the country’s
leading playwrights, a man who flaunts western attire, interests, books and
other periodicals, also having a demure leading actress as his girlfriend, so
the police can only conclude he’s up to no good. In both cases, the voyeur becomes intoxicated
with the subject, so much so that they act in a way that might otherwise be
considered insane, as it’s beyond logic or reason, and might even be considered
an act of love.
Ulrich Mühe, a man who was in real life married to a Stasi
informer, who understands all too well what it feels like to live under
constant police surveillance, plays Captain Gerd Wiesler, an Alec Guinness
look-alike from DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), an unassuming man of quiet intelligence, a
Party advocate who rarely speaks, but continually jots down what he sees in a
small pocket notebook, the eyes and ears of the State. At each level above him are more despicable
men, men enthralled with and corrupted by their own power, men who hold
themselves above the laws of the nation, who would rather intimidate the entire
population into blind obedience. Their
systematic infiltration of the population is legendary, their interrogations
ruthless, operating with 100,000 full-time employees, 200,000 informers,
forcing each citizen to capitulate to the police one interrogation at a
time. In the opening sequence, Wiesler
demonstrates how he wears down his subjects, offering them no sleep, coldly and
calculatingly waiting them out until their resistance is broken, then
threatening their family or loved ones with arrest until they confess. Sebastian Koch is the East German playwright
Georg Dreyman, “the only non-subversive playwright we have,” while Martina
Gedeck is exquisite in the role of his girl friend, the nation’s leading actress,
Christa-Maria Sieland, “the loveliest pearl of the G.D.R,” who unfortunately
has an addiction to popping illegal pills.
The head of the Stasi is forcing Christa to submit to weekly sessions of
sex in exchange for allowing her to work, an artistic practice that is
completely controlled by the State. It
is their apartment that Wiesler bugs, sitting and listening and typing his
reports on everything he hears.
Dreyman is connected to a community of other artists, many
of whom have already defected to the West, which is the government’s greatest
fear, which is why they keep such close tabs on them. Many have already been interrogated and
imprisoned, leaving them with a bitter taste in their mouths, while others have
been blacklisted and out of work for as long as a decade. The Stasi’s method is to imprison them
indefinitely, but long enough so that they voluntarily never again contribute
anything else in their chosen field.
What Wiesler discovers, however, is that these artists are hiding
nothing, exhibiting a rare openness in a society that thrives on secrets and
covering up, discovering instead that it is his own superiors who have the
suspect motives, which puts him in the same impossible position as the people
he is spying on. This turns into a series
of calculated risks, where each side realizes they’re being watched, but they
have to decide how to act. When a
blacklisted director who hasn’t worked in ten years finally hangs himself,
Dreyman and Wiesler simultaneously commit to more drastic actions, beautifully
rendered in a musical sequence where Dreyman plays a piece of piano music given
to him by the director called “Sonata for a Good Man,” a piece written by the
film’s musical composer, Gabriel Yared, which has a significant impact on Wiesler,
who begins to identify with “the lives of others,” omitting significant details
in his reports, as it’s hard for him to believe his government didn’t drive
that man to the breaking point. Dreyman
at one point is heard asking how anyone who has listened to this music, really
listened to it, could ever think of it as anything bad. On several occasions Wiesler nearly blows his
cover, one is a beautifully designed sequence in a bar which is one of the
turning points in the film, as without ever coming out and actually saying so,
he subtly persuades Christa to re-examine her weekly sessions with the Stasi
superior, where she inquires into his motives, as he seems to know so much
about her, questioning if he is a “good man?”
Beautifully written, mixing meticulous detail with
intelligence and humor, where the tone and pacing of the film are perfectly
matched, where the music does not overreach, yet is genuinely in synch with the
mood of the film, where the ensemble cast is flawless, and where the urgency of
the story starts to feel overwhelmingly personal after awhile. There’s another scene nearer the end where
Christa is arrested and subject to interrogation, a scene of indescribable
conflict and tension, where she identifies her interrogator as a friend from an
earlier moment in the film, yet cannot reveal anything, where the interrogator
himself is under observation, so both are placed in an impossible dilemma. This poignantly describes living under the
thumb of relentless totalitarian psychological pressure, eloquently described
in his book as The Captive Mind by
Polish Nobel prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and the film never for a minute
wavers in this regard, filled with small moments that are as revealing as the
larger ones, which include a not so incidental reference to Communist Party
Premiere Gorbachev, a man who simply walked away from a position of unlimited
power, and a man who incidentally changed the entire culture of living under an
authoritarian police state, and in doing so, changed the course of
possibilities for others. It’s a
powerful work for a first time filmmaker who also wrote the film, whose
recollections include his mother being searched by the secret police as a young
boy, which may help explain the dramatic impact this film reaches by the end,
stunningly understated, yet precisely to the point.
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