Finally, an amazing German film which isn't about Nazis

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2008)

It is little wonder that this bleak tale of a government attempting to control everything begins in the magical year of 1984, a certain sequence of numbers which can not possibly be thought of without connotations of George Orwell's powerfully oppressive novel of totalitarian government monopolies  unlike you're a complete philistine who has been living under a rock since 1948  and it's from this setting of mood that we can judge the rest of this amazing piece of cinema from. The first scenes see a prisoner of the state being interrogated for an entire day - no rest, no food, no drink, even no toilet, just questions  and it being spliced together, via cassette recordings of the questioning, with students attending a lecture on how to spot, arrest and bring out a confession from a person suspected of anti-Socialist behaviour. And who is their lecturer? Why no other than the interrogative bastard we've just seen verbally beat a man into submission. So, before we've even met our protagonist yet, and having been introduced to an agent so devout of his cause, we can't help but feel sorry for the man whom is going to come under twenty-four hour surveillance in an attempt to take him from the theatre world where his political plays are causing a fuss amongst the big wigs.
But that is not to say that this marvellous piece of cinema is completely without more humane elements. It is, after all, a study of these men and their incredibly differing characters. Of the man whose job it is to spy on the country's citizens and the man who writes plays with political undertones. And how their lives become so entwined (unbeknownst to the latter as he lives on in blissful ignorance of his surveillance) that his watcher starts to actually feel something. This character he watches and listens to provides him with so much depth, dimension and life he soon realises that this man has everything that his own life has been drained of in the years of his blind obedience to the state. And the question starts to bug him, then burn, before he finally goes about answering it: does he continue his duty to the state, his bosses and his job and just wait for enough evidence to arrest the man and throw him behind bars indefinitely to be subject to the endless questioning we've seen him capable of already? Or does he reassess his morals due to the humanity in this man that he misses  and almost seems to crave  and change daily reports from the surveillance tapes, microphones and cameras which will send the rest of his team off the trail, so there is not enough evidence to arrest him and so his quiet, intrigued voyeurism can continue? This film is cinema as its best for character depth, emotion and identification. A truly powerful piece of film, with an ending which pulls at the heartstrings at even the most toughened of cine-geeks. In a word: beautiful.
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