The Lives of Others

In this year's Academy Awards, many thought the much-lauded "Pan's Labyrinth" was a shue-in for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. But it didn't win and the reason was not Hollywood politicking. No, it was because the winner--"Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)" - is a superior film and the tragedy lies in the fact that this German work of cinema was not nominated for Best Picture, for it is unarguably better than two - if not more - of the films nominated for that category.

The film opens in East Berlin of 1984 as Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) teaches a class on interrogation to future agents of the Stasi, the German Democratic Republic's feared and far-reaching police agency, which had one hundred thousand agents and two hundred thousand informants.

Dissent was verboten.

A quiet, calculative man in his late 40s or early 50s, Weisler is the genuine deal, a firm believer in his country's socialism - which tended to look a lot like communism - and who looks with suspicion at all GDR citizens, even his own students. At the request of Tukur, a superior and former Stasi school classmate, Weisler is assigned to undertake surveillance upon Georg Dreyman (Sebastien Koch), a famous writer whose work has never been thought politically subversive. Nonetheless, Dreyman is a writer and associates with other artists. To the Stasi mind, that is reason enough.

With quick and calculated ease, the Stasi bug the apartment where Dreyman lives with his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), and soon Weisler is sitting at his desk in the lonely attic space atop the apartment complex with his headphones hooked into the audio equipment, taking notes on anything that might be of interest to the State.

As Weisler monitors the couples' lives, he discovers Christa-Marie has a secret that not only poses a problem for herself and Dreyman, but also - with nudging by Tukur for personal motives - a problem for Party Chairman Hemp, a thick man resembling a mix between troll and boar, and who could indeed be the personification of communism, bureaucracy and corruption.

But Weisler encounters a problem of his own, of his own making. As he listens in on Dreyman and Christa-Marie, he slowly enters their world, their love. He listens to their music, hears their conversations, their intimacies. In a poignant moment, when the two are in bed, with Dreyman holding Christa-Maria after she has had an ugly and painfully intimate experience with the Party, Weisler sits at his desk, solitarily listening to the two lovers in their silence, his body arched and curled around an imaginary Christa-Marie of his own.

But Weisler is not easily won over, for his past - his passion - is for the State; the GDR is his weltanschauung. And he also gets increasingly pressured to find evidence of Dreyman's dissent by Tukur, who himself is pressured by Hempf.

Hagan Boganski's cinematography smoothly sets the mood of the film, with somber and cool tones, bordering on the cold, that softly connote the oppressive nature of life under Party rule. It is this oppression that finally drives Dreyman, previously an artist innocuous to the State, to write something truly subversive that expresses the bleakness of the GDR. He does this with the aid of fellow artists in his own apartment, which he believes is clear of any surveillance.

As Dreyman struggles with printed dissent, Weisler struggles with an inner kind. On at least one occasion he comes to the brink of turning in damning evidence of Dreyman's subversive writing, but he holds back. Doe he not love the State? He does, but he also has an interest in the couple, for he envies a life like theirs, a life of love, which is contrasted against his, where he returns home to an empty apartment and the only love he knows is via a prostitute. In fact, he roots for the couple, even trying to stop Christa-Maria from making bad personal decisions.

This quiet film is, above all, a deeply personal one. Writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck manages to weave a story that showcases the inner strength and inner weakness that is man. His script is tight and well-ordered and his directing unobtrusive: no shaky hand-held camera or soaring crane shots; no extremely over- or under- exposed film stock; no MTV-edited sequences. The film has a voice that is firm and solid. No frills or bags of tricks are needed to hold the viewer's attention.

Gedeck, Koch and Mühe give moving performances as all three of their characters struggle against contradicting impulses and confront personal fears and desires. Risks are taken, people are interrogated, sacrifices are made. And not everyone triumphs.

Muhe, above all, delivers a salient portrayal of the determined yet conflicted Weisler. Perhaps his inspiration was the fact that he himself was the target of Stasi surveillance when he was an actor in East Berlin. Sadly, Muhe died last July of cancer, though he leaves behind a performance, as well as a film, worth viewing again and again.

"The Lives of Others" was released on DVD on August 21st.