Stylish and intelligent character study

Rating: 9/10 (22 May 2007)

At the start of the 21st century, German cinema is again drawing audience attention as a new generation of directors and filmmakers are starting to make films that deal directly with the dark days of the country's 20th century history. So far Goodbye Lenin and Downfall have both gained significant critical acclaim and not insignificant audience figures the world over, however the Oscar winning The Lives of Others is definitely the pick of the bunch.
A quality piece of cinema for anyone, The Lives of Others is particularly impressive in coming from a first time writer-director, the wonderfully named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Von Donnersmarck manages to combine a social comment on the dying days of the German Democratic Republic with an insightful character study and genuinely tense surveillance thriller. Von Donnersmarck does a fine job of bringing a sense of the bleak, grey quality of East Germany in the 1980s, expertly conveyed through the character of dedicated Stasi investigator Gerd Wiesler. Wiesler is the ultimate grey man, fading completely in the background even in some of his own movie, living a life of meticulous routine. In focusing the film on how Wiesler learns to appreciate a new view of the world in living vicariously through the artist couple he is listening in on, playwright Georg Dreyman and his leading lady Christa-Maria Sieland, von Donnersmarck is able to make a wider point about how the era of perestroika and glasnost came about through the ordinary people waking up to the life they could have more than changing views of their leaders.
The film also is an interesting and very real portrait of life in the security service that spied on virtually everyone and the atmosphere of fear this creates. Some of the film's finest scenes are those that revolve around the Stasi offices, combining the mundanity of lectures and office life with the chilling situation of having to watch everything you say and think. The opening of the film is a great moment, cross cutting Wiesler interrogating a suspect with him playing the tape of the interrogation to a class of young wannabe Stasi operatives as Wiesler demonstrates how to break down a suspect and the signs that he is lying. A particularly fine moment comes in forcing the suspect to sit on his sweaty palmed hands and then removing the seat he has been sat on in order to have something for dogs to sniff him out in future. Another fine moment has Wiesler and his superior listening in on a group of younger co-workers in the Stasi cafeteria telling an insulting joke about Erich Honecker, the GDR's head of state , the character who tells it is not seen again in the film until the end when he is seen demoted to steaming open envelopes. These nice little details are what really make The Lives of Others seem to exist in a very banal, real world making the disturbing levels of surveillance even more chilling.
In general, The Lives of Others is better at creating a human face to these Stasi characters than it is at making its dissident artists likable. Wiesler's superior, Anton Grubitz, is a self centred figure concerned largely with career advancement, however von Donnersmarck's writing and a strong performance from Ulrich Tukur manage to give him a sense of being a decent ordinary character who happens to work for a shady secret service. Dreyman and Sieland, however, come across as pretentious and self absorbed and one of the film's major weaknesses is that it never truly makes you care what happens to these two and this damages the effectiveness of the humanising of Wiesler as he observes them.
However, an exceptional performance from Ulrich Muhe manages to bypass this trouble as he makes Wiesler's transformation both realistic and compelling. Unlike the likes of Grubitz, it is clear that Wiesler really believes in what he is doing and is truly dedicated to the cause of what he terms "socialism" and has a professionalism other characters lack. However, he is a man utterly subsumed by his profession to the point where he appears to have little identity of his own, something well established by scenes of his monotonous home life. Von Donnersmarck, rarely for a first time writer director, does not over-write excessive levels of explanatory dialogue, relying on his leading man to bring a power to wordless scenes where Muhe shows in the smallest details Wiesler's emotional arc. There are some great moments as Wiesler begins to live vicariously through the more free living couple, the tear in his eye as he listens to the music they play or the moment in which he finally enters their apartment and is able to see all the objects he has only been able to picture in his head while listening in.
The film does eventually not quite know how to wrap things up with multiple endings and epilogues of "two years later" and then another "two years later", however the final moments are a sentimental, bittersweet scene which rounds off the film nicely while the shots of East Berlin in the 90s show a certain ambiguity to the end of the GDR, still grey and bleak only now the walls are covered in graffiti, a sign that people have more freedom but that life as a whole has not improved that much. The Lives of Others is an intelligent and gripping character study and one shows that we could be hearing a lot more from the name Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which can only be a good thing as it is an excellent name. *****