Malevolent presence

Rating: Null/10 (19 November 2010)

I had no idea the world of The Lives of Others would fascinate me so much. I don't give much cred to Oscar winners, foreign or otherwise. Yet I was lucky to grow up in a country that just barely escaped the iron grip of communism but at the same time one that existed just outside of that reach, every now and then the Iron Curtain would be lifted and something would filter through, groping violently in a society that is still deeply class divided to this day. I didn't live through the Dictatorship of the Proletariat but I remember Zastavas and Ladas and old beatup Yugos in the streets and Gorbachev in the news, and a few days ago, on the 17th of November, we celebrated the fall of the military junta of '68, a totalitarian regime that existed on the backs of its own type of Stasi and oppression of human rights. This is still fresh and emblematic in our national memory, so this film hits home in ways someone born in America is lucky never to have to deal with even in retrospect.
If I like this so much it's because it's something at once familiar and otherworldly, mysterious and horrifying because some of the features are known to me but not the whole, because it takes place in cold empty streets and gray apartment rises all identical to one another that remind me of cold Berlin neighborhoods I visited, characters groping for identity and expression in surroundings that deny them. It's all very crushing because ideology is not the end but the means by which selfish men can pursue selfish goals, because a figurative heaven where things for Georg and Marie would be fine exists in the very same city, just outside a dividing wall, across the street. Streets are empty because something keeps people from venturing out, and I like how that urban desert of fear and suspicion is shown to seep inside living-rooms, behind closed doors a malevolent presence groping blindly and unseen there.
The only thing amiss here for me is that The Lives of Others tries to exist in a state of matter-of-factly observation. I would love to see a Zulawski version, character emotions swirling in violent storms, or one made by a New Wave minimalist, where faces are mute and the silence deafening. Von Donnermarck's movie is a little too concerned with going with the flow of established filmmaking, of what is immediately expected and accepted by this type of film. I wanted to see it make breaches with the audience, to be difficult and not give us all that we want. The storytelling is perfect but at the expense of that poetic extension where things are allowed to linger in the mind and be metaphors, enigmas, mysteries haunting and supine.
The marvelous thing about it is that it has amazing characters. I like how they not only rise to moral standards in affirmation of the human spirit but also fall from them with the same affirmation. Marie's final betrayal is crushing, she sells both soul and body, and it's tragic because she's damned even before she's allowed that choice. I like how the film doesn't end with the cathartic note, with the bang. We're given the echo, the aftermath. The regime has fallen but the former minister still attends the theater, still wearing an expensive suit. That malevolent presence has seeped out, it always does to fight another day. Former DDR politicians now have lucrative careers as advisers like former KGB officials in Russia are now political barons. But the failings of a political system that cheated people on the base of ideology are shown in chilling detail, and more, the lives behind all that, with their small triumphs and follies, crushed by that system but with that small beacon of humanity, pride or dignity, still intact.