Excellent (despite a curious flaw)

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 2011)

The Lives Of Others is, more or less, writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut and as such it is more than impressive. It speaks volumes that his cast, all well-established actors in Germany, agreed to work for a fifth of what they could normally expect to be paid. (It is, though, rather baffling that after the content and treatment of The Lives, von Donnersmarck's next project was the thoroughly entertaining but essentially super-lightweight The Tourist.) Others have criticised The Lives for giving a narrow portrayal of life in the former German Democratic Republic (always referred to in the Cold War years by the West Germans as 'die sogenannte DDR'), but that is a little unfair in that von D's film doesn't pretend but to give an insight into the lives of a very specific section of DDR society, the 'intellectual'. (Actually, my quote marks are superfluous as the Germans do, as a rule, take the life of the mind a damn sight more seriously than we Anglo-Saxons, although at times, to my tastes, a tad too seriously. But be that as it may.)
The Lives takes place in the declining years of the DDR when, as usual, the tendency to corruption was absolute and, for example, a powerful party functionary and minister of culture can arbitrarily ruin the professional life of a well-known actress because he is piqued that she start an affair with him. Having raped her in his official limousine (with his ubiquitous driver still sitting in the front) didn't win him any brownie points, that's for sure. It is his lust for the actress which sets in trail the surveillance of her partner, a tame playwright and writer who despite the exhortations of his more radical friends to take a stand, has managed to continue to bask in the goodwill of the party without actually selling out. The minister of culture instructs his ambitious contact in the secret police to dig whatever dirt he can on the playwright in order to discredit him and smooth his path into the actress's favours. The contact, in turn, instructs an underling and nominal friend in the Stasi to bug the playwright's flat and keep him under surveillance. As that underling, in time, gets to hear more and more details of his target's life, he comes to realise what a nasty set up his socialist state and its masters have become. Finally, when he comes across exactly they kind of dirt he is tasked to find – the playwright has written an article for a West German news magazine about the soaring suicide rate in this particular workers' paradise – he decides not to report it and instead falsifies the records he keeps of his surveillance.
I don't usually give a try to précis a plot, but I have done so here because it is a fascinating one which could have played out in any authoritarian state anywhere in the world and von Donnersmarck's German version is outstanding in its portrayal of how utterly intrusive the state apparatus was in everyone's life. But it has one small, but crucial flaw: its description of how the once proudly patriotic Stasi operative, who even lectures on interrogation techniques, slowly loses the faith is unconvincing. It happens to quickly. He is shown to be a lonely man with no outside interests, an unmarried man who hires prostitutes more for their company than for sexual gratification and who lives in a comfortable, though sparse and soulless flat in a soulless tower block. If anything the man as portrayed might be expected to become more rather than less zealous as a crude ploy to give his life the semblance of meaning.
On paper it sounds fine, but the man's conversation into a 'good man' (ein guter Mensch) simply does not convince in von Donnersmarck's film. Such a radical change – from enthusiastic Stasi officer into more or less a traitor in the eyes of his colleagues – is so fundamental that it would have been a far more gradual process and taken years to come about. This is not how we see it in the film: apparently from one day to the next his patriotism goes AWOL, and his subsequent anti-state actions – hiding the typewriter on which the playwright wrote his contentious article and which could identify him - are simply logical consequences of that change of heart.
I am now in danger of damning with faint praise, and I don't mean to do that. But for apart from what I regard as a flaw The Lives is excellent, not only as a film but as a production made on a comparative shoestring, and it deserves all the awards it garnered. If somehow it comes your way, take time to see it.