Powerful reminder of not too distant past.

Rating: 9/10 (26 July 2008)

There seems to have been no shortage of totalitarian Philistines in East Germany after World War Two's housecleaning of the Nazi Party. Soviet Communism had a vast network of secret police and informers to practice their 1984 Big Brother tactics on it's fellow citizens with incredible fervor (Stasi agents) and fear (informers).
In a stunningly subdued portrait of totalitarian repression The Lives of Others presents us with the reality of the Orwell experiment that was East Germany. Grounded in reality it does not have the option to utilize the future as seen through the imaginative eye of a fantasy, sci-fi storey line complete with dazzling pyrotechnics (Brazil, Blade Runner) depicting a 1984 future. Others is more terrifying than that since it took place in the lifetime of most adults living today.
It is indeed 1984 and the Stasi (secret police) still have a firm grip on the long suffering people of East Germany. Repression and censorship is the rule of the day and no dissent is brooked, period. Artists are naturally stifled, yet some manage to get their work staged by playing along with the Party. Playwright, Georg Dreyman is a State fave, but chafes at the treatment of other artists black listed for being more forthcoming. A Beria like culture minister with designs on Dreyman's beautiful actress girlfriend initiates a file on him. Agent Wiesler (brilliantly portrayed by Ulrich Muhe) , a committed and ultra thorough investigator takes up the task. Dreyman believing he is above suspicion writes an anonymous piece for de Spiegel exposing the East and Wiesler has the goods on him. Wiesler's intense observation of Dreyman and co-horts though has exposed him perhaps for the first time in his life to the beauty of art, the preciousness of relationships and the freedom to think as an individual. Could the brainwashed career man be weakening?
Director/writer Florian Herbel von Dommenmarck has made a powerful and important film with Other Peoples Lives. It is a sober, grim telling of what a society is capable of in the firm grip of a police state and the petty venal bureaucrats running it. His overall visual palette ideally captures the drab colorless GDR setting inhabited by anxious citizens and polluting Trabants. It is a joyless world of deep suspicion where neighbors, friends, co-workers, teammates (even Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt was an informer) are turned against each other. It is society at it's most abysmal. I would make it required viewing for all freedom loving people were it not totalitarian of me to do so.