Excellent film, insightful character studies

Rating: 9/10 (17 May 2007)

This film, set in the theater world of the mid-1980s, was particularly satisfying to me because I was a producer of avant-garde theater through the 1980s, based in San Francisco but often on tour -- including to international theater festivals in West Germany, communist Poland and communist Yugoslavia in 1987. Although my experience as an American was of course very different than the experience of these East Berliners, there is a mood and sense of personalities in this film that I found authentic and familiar. The people in this film feel like the people I met in the festival bars and refreshment centers for participating artists and on panel discussions in those festivals.
Many commenters here have noted the important character change of the Stasi agent, attributing the change either to his growing appreciation for the humanity of the playwright and the actress, or else complaining that the transformation is unpersuasive. So far as I've read in the comments, no one has focused on the key scene. When the Stasi agent hears the playwright and friends planning the suicide article to be smuggled to the West, he writes up an accurate report on this and hastens to his boss's office. Up until then, whatever sympathies he may have developed for the playwright or for the actress are inadequate to deter him.
But when the agent enters the boss's office, the boss doesn't immediately give him a chance to give the report or to say anything -- instead the boss immediately launches into a discussion of a new study analyzing how to interrogate and intimidate artists and writers. The report categorizes writers and artists into 5 basic personality types. The boss says the playwright is a "type 4." He describes how the prescribed approach to intimidate "type 4" writers will result in them losing hope and never writing again.
Only after hearing this, and realizing that his report exposing the playwright as the author of the suicide paper will result in the playwright being crushed emotionally and never even wanting to write anything new, does the Stasi agent curl up the report in his hands and decide not to give the report to his boss. The agent's precise motivation is unclear. But it cannot be merely that the agent wants the playwright to be able to continue writing new works. The agent must know that the state will never let the playwright do another play or publish anything, if the playwright's authorship of the suicide paper is known, and yet the agent was ready to expose the playwright anyway. So the agent's motive for suddenly deciding to hide his report is not merely because the state will put the playwright on a blacklist and block him from publishing or getting plays produced.
Thus it must be that the agent is motivated to change by feeling a general revulsion against the idea that the state should employ the crushing of hope, of creative spirit, as a strategy for responding to a dissenter whom the agent knows is a genuine supporter of the regime but who sees that it has flaws. It is the fact that the state will destroy the playwright's very desire to write, that causes the agent to change. It isn't clear whether the agent would draw back from inflicting that kind of punishment on any artist, even one whom he felt to be a real enemy of the state, but it is clear that he can't bring himself to inflict it on a man whom he feels is a "good" man like the playwright. And the agent believes the playwright is "good" because the playwright supports what is good about society, tries to correct what is wrong about society, is loyal even to a friend who has made powerful enemies, and treats his lover with compassion even when it appears the lover is betraying him.
And the irony -- a good irony -- is that by acting to preserve the playwright's desire to write, the agent winds up being the focus of the playwright's novel -- a novel born of a desire and drive to write that the agent himself kept the state from destroying.
Thus it seems to me that the real message of this movie is that even the most unimaginative, bland, uncreative, rigid people -- such as the Stasi agent -- should appreciate and protect the desire that drives creative people who are also "good" people to create works of art and literature.