Truly Excellent Film

Rating: Null/10 (23 April 2007)

This movie is quite simply one of the best, and one of the most moving, that I've seen in a year. When it won the Oscar for best foreign language film a couple of months back, I hadn't even heard of it, but some excellent reviews induced me to forsake the California spring sunshine for the cool darkness of the Santa Cruz Nickleodean on a Saturday afternoon, and it was well worth the sacrifice. It's astonishingly good. I can't recall the last time a film genuinely moved me close to tears. (Usually when I cry at a movie, it's out of boredom or sheer frustration at the utter banality and lack of imagination.) It is totally engrossing, but never so complex that the story is hard to follow (an occasional fault with spy stories.) Set in East Berlin in 1984, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Lives of Others examines the menacing control the state police, the Stasi, had over the lives of everyone in East Germany, especially artists, who might have been considered subversives.
Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and Christa (Martina Gedeck) are an attractive couple. He is one of the few East German playwrights who is produced in the East but retains enough credibility to be read in the West. He treads a fine line with work which keeps him out of trouble with the Stasi, while still socializing with writers who are banned. She is an actress who is lusted after by the culture minister, an unpleasant individual who abuses his power by trying to have dirt dragged up on Dreyman, so he can move in on Christa. Stasi captain Wiesler (marvelous Ulrich Muhe) is set to spy on Dreyman and Christa, bugging their apartment, and reporting on their lives, trying to find something incriminating. All day he sits in the loft over their building, listening, but as their lives unfold he gets absorbed in their humanity and starts to doubt the system of which he is such a vital part. His own life is lonely; committed to the state which has nurtured him, he lacks warm, affectionate human contact but is at least still capable of recognizing it in others, and perhaps envying it. And when Dreyman's close friend, a fellow playwright, commits suicide out of despair at the hopelessness of life in the East, Dreyman can no longer maintain his distance, and he becomes involved in the political opposition, with tragic consequences for him and Christa, but surprising consequences for Wiesler.
One of the things that is intriguing about a movie like this, at least to me, is all the little details of the spy's techniques, the sheer efficiency with which the apartment is completely bugged in a few minutes, for example. Or the classroom full of eager students learning interrogation methods. Very well illustrated too, is the air of menace which kept a population subdued with very little obvious physical violence. I've always been a sucker for spy stories, anything by John Le Carre, Graham Greene or the recent movie Breach, etc. The Lives of Others is right up there with the best stories. Congratulations to all concerned on the Oscar. Very well deserved.