A great movie about mediocrity, thoroughness, morality and power.

Rating: 9/10 (14 January 2008)

Mediocrity, thoroughness, morality, power. These words come into my mind after seeing this very German movie, which is otherwise also a great movie. It has a great atmosphere, giving back the grey world of the DDR: grey buildings, grey Trabants and Wartburgs, grey people, a country ruled by mediocrity even in its colours.
Nevertheless, a thorough world: the Stasi thoroughly maintains the files about the many suspects, the agents thoroughly install the bugs in their flats and thoroughly watch them. (Later in the unified Germany they thoroughly maintain the very same files and make them open for everyone. A thorough nation, the Germans.)
But the Germans also value morality and this is also evident in the movie. The moral awakening causes the otherwise conformist writer to challenge the Communist power and the very same moral attitude causes the much less typical and much less anticipated awakening of the Stasi agent watching the writer. The latter transformation is clearly more exciting, as the grey, mediocre, thorough and lonely Stasi agent, the loyal servant realizes the real nature of the Communist power during the observation of the writer and her wife. In the end he also challenges this power in his own humble way.
The story should also be instructive for us Hungarians, as it shows an example of how a nation should handle its dark past. The Germans already did a fairly impressive "brainwash" after WWII to reach a catharsis on the sinful Nazi past and they did a similarly impressive moral confrontation in the 90's with their Communist past and the Stasi. I envy them, because we Hungarians have failed in this. The Germans consistently opened all the Stasi files, and allowed everyone to go and see who had been watched and who had been the agents and the informers.
In Hungary, this did not happen. What happened instead was that many of the informers became prominent politicians (other professions exposed to the public like artists, journalists, church officials were/are also heavily "infected") and the files were used to blackmail them, or to get rid of them in a few occasions. Not exactly the right way to purify the society. And the society is indeed far from being purified: they just do not really care if it turns out that some prominent person was an informer back in the Communist era. So, when such files come to the public, the former agent just says some weak excuses ("I was forced into this" and " I always tried to defend the people around me" and "I never wrote anything harmful", etc.) and then everything continues as before.
This was what happened to Oscar-winner film director István Szabó whose story is particularly striking. An article was published in a weekly uncovering the fact that he was an informer back in the early 60's. His personal post-scandal behaviour is a typical example of trying to get away with feeble excuses. The reaction of the society was an example of accepting these cheap excuses without criticism, just because Szabó was an otherwise famous, talented and popular person, a "nice" guy.
And this is a pity: Szabó is one of the few informers who could have stood up and confess his "sins" without losing his authenticity, because Szabó the artist has done the confession. His best films showed how the power can corrupt talented but weak persons, how one can lose one's integrity. He got his Oscar for exploring this very topic in Mephisto, (and he got Oscar nominations for two other similar movies with Brandauer). And then he did confront this issue even more explicitly in Taking sides, too. And he did it in the right way, exposing all the complexity and all the moral issues. So, it is indeed a pity he could not do it in the right way in his personal life. And it is indeed a pity that we Hungarians could not do it the right way. The Germans did.