"Sonate vom guten Menschen" also made this reviewer dewy-eyed!

Rating: 9/10 (4 May 2007)

A deserving Oscar winner if ever there was one, though I was never one to pay special attention to the Oscars, I was almost shocked by how perfect this debut movie by a 34-year-old director very nearly was. Set in East Berlin in the mid-80s, some five years before the infamous Wall crumbled, it follows the STASI as they plot to find incriminating evidence against playwright Georg Dreyman, who'd been the regime's darling until a ruthless minister frivolously develops a lecherous desire to possess his girlfriend, renowned stage actress Christa-Maria Sieland. Though both Sebastian Koch (last seen by me as the Nazi Captain Müntze in Verhoeven's Black Book) and Martina Gedeck are excellent as the central couple trapped within the STASI's web of eavesdropping and paranoia tactics, the real hero and star of the movie is without a doubt Ulrich Mühe. I had last seen in Michael Haneke's Funny Games, where he played Georg, the unfortunate husband and dad who comes to a sticky end. In The Lives of Others, Mühe memorably fills the shoes of the STASI agent Gerd Wiesler who listened to Dreyman's daily life through the bugs in his flat. Balding, physically non-descript Wiesler conveys more with one subtle shift of an eyeball than the whole stellar cast of an Oliver Stone movie. This actor is so charismatic, he blows even the undeniably talented and handsome Sebastian Koch clear off the screen. In this movie not only are things seldom what they seem, but humanity and redemption can be found in the most ridiculously unexpected places.
Shocking, humane and moving yet never predictable, heavy-handed or melodramatic, the movie is also blessed by a solid script, a very plausible storyline free of plot holes and an immaculately researched scenario. I've read that both the movie's director and Mühe remember their experiences living in the Communist regime. Though the former was still very young, he claims to clearly remember the climate of paranoia he grew up in, while Mühe later discovered that he had been spied upon by his own wife! Oddly enough, one accusation levelled against the movie by some IMDb reviewers is that of misogyny. Being normally very sensitive to a discriminatory portrayal of women, I was very baffled by this. I've come to the conclusion that some touchy viewers expect their movie characters  especially those of women or ethnic minorities  to be paragons of virtue or role models, rather than simply human beings with flaws and plausible weaknesses. In my view Christa-Maria's main sin was not to be "weak", as some other viewers here claim, but simply "human". If anything, the movie also provided a damning portrait of the brutality of the regime against women.
Perhaps my only, very minor complaint with the movie was its ending, which felt a tad rushed - though it was a beautiful ending all the same - uplifting and sad, poetic and yet also grounded in the starkest reality.