Incredible study of corrosive effect of eavesdropping

Rating: 10/10 (2 May 2007)

This film won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2007 and from my point-of-view is quite deserving of the Oscar. I hear Pan's Labyrinth was fantastic and I heard also that "Water" was very good. That said, I do not think it would be a pox on the judgment of the Academy in the future that Das Leben was awarded the Oscar because I imagine it compares favorably, or at least is in the same class, as two of those other films, and probably the other nominees as well. The film covers the lives and activities of those on both sides of the Stasi (East German secret police) from 1984 over a period of several years and then tracks the fallout from this activity through the period around the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the early 1990s. The premise for the film is intriguing and unlike anything I have ever seen before. It follows one East German Stasi agent named Wiesler (a very controlled and seething and fantastic Ulrich Muehe) as he eavesdrops on the wiretapped apartment of a prominent playwright, Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) who the Secret Police wants to oversee because of concerns about his loyalty to the state. The do not have more specific suspicions than that, but the Stasi is feeling more pressured to uphold the image of Communism in East Germany and so they are cracking down on supposed heterodoxy in whatever form it takes.
As time goes on however, Wiesler becomes increasingly disenchanted with the surveillance which he is implementing for the Stasi and questioning of its purpose. He starts to wonder whether the surveillance of Dreyman and his girlfriend Christa Marie (Martina Gedeck) an artist who may or may not be as committed to resisting the pressures of the Stasi as he is Dreyman becomes increasingly involved in revealing a health problem in East Germany. This health problem is not widely known in the West. It is a complex and riveting movie about the changing loyalties and devotion of people to differing points-of-view. It is a film not to be missed about the development and changes of people. The direction by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is fantastic. The subtle shift in change of attitude for Wiesler, becoming more personally sympathetic while covering his tracks and prohibiting his advancement minded boss, the slithery Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur in a fantastically precise performance), in the hands of the wrong director, could easily change the tone of the film to the point that his opposition became obvious and the Stasi took obvious, punitive, humiliating retaliation against him. But von Donnersmarck is more interested in the subtle change of attitudes over time. Wiesler changes so subtly, that it is some time before the Stasi recognizes it and precisely because if his change of attitude happened very quickly he would have been eliminated instantaneously.
The film is an interesting study of the effects of surveillance not only on its targets and how their lives change, but also on those who do the surveilling. It is a reflection that surveilling exposes the agents to supposedly revolutionary beliefs and there is the chance that they will be changed by the people and beliefs that they are attempting to surveille.