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February 23, 2007
The Lives of Others
(out of four)
Some foreign films don't feel foreign at all. In The Lives of Others, German newcomer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck directs with an elegance that will seem instantly familiar to American audiences. But more than that, his Oscar-nominated debut presents a picture of East Germany that echoes our current concerns with privacy and paranoia. Set in 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall came down, this drab Orwellian stage hosts a truly universal parable.
For its intended audience, the movie serves as a conscience-cleanser of sorts, a way of coming to terms with East Germany's past at a time when ordinary citizens were arrested, interrogated and harassed by the Stasi, or secret police. But we needn't evaluate The Lives of Others in German terms. In crossing the Atlantic, the movie gains in layers and relevance, anchored always by the intelligence — and grim humor — of Henckel von Donnersmarck's script. He makes a risky decision, choosing for his protagonist someone who might easily serve as the villain of another film, an obedient middle-aged Stasi captain named Gerd Weisler (Ulrich Muhe).
Some might be offended by a sympathetic portrayal of Weisler, while others may have trouble accepting the character's ultimate humanity. Audiences are certainly entitled to these reactions, and yet it's a fitting entry point into this story because it makes the viewers — already voyeurs by definition — complicit in Weisler' surveillance. We want to see. But as we permit ourselves to pry, we also come to understand how other Iron Curtain citizens might have become informants against their own neighbors.
Like Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, The Lives of Others is the psychological study of a man who, for all intents and purposes, has no life of his own but makes up for it by eavesdropping on the lives of others. Weisler's primary target is a popular playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), whom he immediately suspects, and he volunteers to monitor the young writer's apartment.
If you look hard enough, everyone has secrets. But as the unemotional agent listens, he begins to realize that his superiors, namely Minister Bruno Kempf (Thomas Thieme), want Dreyman removed for purely personal reasons. It's easy to create a villain like Kempf, particularly in period pieces where hindsight makes the "bad guys" more clean-cut. But a character like Weisler is tougher, especially as he allows himself to intervene in Dreyman's affairs, forcing us to consider the gray areas.
The result is tragic, but manageably so, and the entire last act feels unnecessary. The film's most poignant moment occurs much earlier, when Weisler lets a solitary tear escape while listening to Dreyman play the piano. As the devastated artist says aloud, oblivious that others are listening, "Can anyone who has heard this music — I mean, truly heard it — really be a bad person?" In Henckel von Donnersmarck's world, such people can be heroes.
[as featured in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram]
Posted by Peter Debruge on