An unheralded gem

Rating: 9/10 (24 February 2007)

This movie is getting very little press, but it is a remarkable and compelling film with outstanding performances and excellent direction. It takes place just before the end of the cold war, when the Berlin wall came down and East Germany was no longer isolated and terrorized by the Stasi--the secret police. The main character is a Stasi agent and a professor of a class for incoming agents. He teaches his students to be suspicious of everyone and outlines techniques for breaking down a suspect, such as months of sensory deprivation. He couldn't appear to be much more of a cold-hearted drone.
Politics of the most venal kind shape the plot, wherein the head of the Stasi wants to get rid of the boyfriend/playwright of an actress whom he (and nearly every character in the movie) finds captivating so that he can have her to himself. He orders that the couple's apartment be wired in hopes that the boyfriend will reveal himself as an enemy of the state. Our agent/professor takes 12-hour night shifts in the attic in front of a bank of recording devices and a front-door video feed, listening in on everything that goes on between the actress and the playwright.
Sound dreary? It isn't. The playwright and his friends are alive--real people. You see what goes on in the apartment, and in the rendezvous of the playwright and his friends, and his now-blacklisted director. You come to understand how much is at stake for an artist who loses state sanction. You see the love and respect that the playwright and the actress have for one another. You see the politicking behind this attempt to find some evidence of subversiveness that would knock the playwright out of commission. And you see glimmerings of humanity begin to develop in our drone-like agent/professor.
I'll say no more of the plot, other than that the tone of the movie is consistent and the acting is impeccable throughout. The plot advances at its own pace, and the director avoids the heavy-handed or sappy ending that most directors would have been tempted to employ.
This is without question one of the best movies I've seen in a very long time. I strongly recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind subtitles or a leisurely pace.