Better late than never!

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2007)

In view of the fact that almost two decades have passed since the fall of the wall, we have had precious few mainstream films on the subject of the Communist regime in the eastern block, while we have been virtually submerged in a flood of American films about CIA surveillance of suspicious US citizens, as if free speech exists only for self-recriminatory purposes. The Americans, more than any other nation in the world, have propagated the view that the American society and political machinery is rotten to the core. How delicious, then, finally to see a German film revealing the full horrors of the Socialist regime in DDR, and even better that it is well-acted and well-written. Based, presumably, on the idea of German writer Heinrich Böll's "Die ungezählte Geliebte", (the uncounted sweetheart) about an invalid who is hired by the establishment to count the people passing over a bridge, but who refuses to count the girl he has come to love from afar, "The Lives of the Others" is the story of the Stasi officer who suddenly finds that he has a heart and that he can no longer carry out the orders of a brutal system. Ulrich Mühe, the Stasi man Wiesler, or HGW, is particularly admirable in his poker face performance. The film's only drawback is the necessary leaps in time which detracts from the intensity of the story. But, above all, we should welcome more films of this kind, before we are cinematically mesmerized into believing that all the crooks in the world are Americans. Let's maintain a healthy balance.