Creepy. Suspenseful.

Rating: 8/10 (15 July 2019)

Creepy. Suspenseful.
Spoilers. Opinions. Observations.
Pre-end of Berlin Wall coming tumbling down (in East Germany) a few years into the future. Creepy officers voice-manhandling hard-working artistes such as a playwright and an actress. They are not allowed to delve into western ideals nor any whiff of outside influences. If you as their compatriots know about any of that shameful subversive stuff, it's off to the Teutonic salt mines for you (or the equivalent).
This reminds one of more recent times when writers and journalists in other countries are criminalized for their modern ideas, spending lives in prison or jails of the mind - not to mention self-demise as happened to a movie director in this film.
This film: Rated "R". Sex-sex-sex. The actress with the playwright. The actress with a jowly, ugly old man, forcibly, in the back of a limousine. Another man with a pay-by-the-half-hour "professional" hookup.
A red typewriter ribbon tells a lot. The portable typewriter itself is a significant character in this drama, and becomes an important piece of evidence.
This story is told in hindsight, perhaps in flashbacking. The main characters are, early on, tortured in many ways, but some actually live through the wall coming down and the nation of that time ceasing to exist into the future. Even some of the bad guys manage to make it to the new life. The playwright, earlier blackballed against writing because of his 'crimes', has now written a book on display in the Karl Marx bookstore. Scratching my head about old Karl. I thought that he was passé after the wall came down.
If you thought that Hogan's Heroes was funny, about an earlier Germanic time period, this film ain't hilarious, folks. There are no dumbkopf Colonel Klink or slow-on-the-uptake Sergeant Schultz, but there are high-ranking officers here wearing close-to-Nazi uniforms that remind one of World War Two.
Spoiler: Seeing the actress all bloody in the street, near the end, I remembered that I have studied acting many times and that this is all fake and that she is just playing a part. An actress was portraying an actress who was harassed by insane goons whose days were numbered. Earlier in this film, she was an actress in a play on stage while the goons scrutinized her with binoculars. I thought, "This is a play within a play."
I have critiqued films for IMDb since 2002. I take ongoing film studies coursework at university, and have a BA in History from there. I have also acted on stage and studied theatre, theatrical critiquing and censorship, stage makeup, dance, voice and fine arts at that university. The arts are my life.