different perspectives

Rating: 8/10 (25 December 2007)

I am born and have lived much of my life in communist Romania. There is a difference I think between the way I and other like me have received this film and the way it was received by folks who were born or lived most of their lives in countries where dictatorship is known only from news, books or films. The very existence of a repressive police machine that supervises every aspect of private lives, that suspects and follows its citizens with the purpose of detecting any act or tendency of political disobedience, up to intervening brutally in their lives may be news for the occidental viewer, but not for us.
On this revelation for the unsuspecting viewer is based part of the impact of 'Das Leben der Anderen'. Another side of the secret is the human story, the story of good people in the bad 'democratic' republic of Germany. Geor Dreyman (acted by Sebastian Koch) is a successful writer who succeeds to become successful and to live a reasonable style of life by compromising in his play-writing of theater about factories and workers. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is a Sasi captain who receives the mission to supervise Dreyman, not so much because of political reasons but more because a Communist minister wants to eliminate him as a rival to the favors of his beautiful actress girlfriend. Paradoxically, the two, although no strangers to the limitations of the regime are also the only true believers in the movie, trying to find its good parts, and to match them with their own personal ideals. However, the totalitarian brand of socialism practiced behind the Iron Curtain is nothing but a police system trying to keep in power the party dictatorship, and the only way to be true to the personal ideals is the the two characters to commit treason. Dreyman will write a 'subversive' article and send it to the West, Wieser will secretly cover him and will reveal to no one the dissident change in the writer's approach, at the risk of his own career.
There are at least two memorable scenes in the film. Inone of them a young Sasi officer tells a political joke, and is being heard by one of his superior. The boss plays a cruel game with him, threatening him to destroy his career and then apparently joining him with the laughs. We do however see later that the forgiveness was apparent, when in a later scene we find the young officer sent to a lower grade of work by opening and reading private mail of the citizens, together with Wieser, punished for his lack of vigilance in the Dreyman case. It is however no usual day, it is the day the Berlin wall fell, and we see the Stasi officers whose role was suddenly canceled abandoning their place of work and exiting from the dark underground room to the outside world.
I liked less the general conception of the movie, which tries to satisfy the needs of commercial cinema. It looks like made with the Oscar for the foreign film in mind, and it actually got it. The final scenes that happen years after the fall of the Communism, and try to provide some kind of forgiveness and especially the very last scene seemed very untrue to me. The suffering and scores of lives destroyed by the communist regimes in Eastern Europe scarcely deserve this kind of forgiveness.