PLOT: In mid-'80s East Germany, a captain in the Stasi secret police is ordered to "find dirt" on a popular playwright. He becomes so entwined in the playwright's life and so enamoured, that he undermines the investigation.
"What do you have to hide?" It's the mantra of invasion-of-privacy apologists everywhere, whether the subject is street-camera surveillance, wiretapping or general disregard of habeas corpus.
An Oscar nominee for best foreign film, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's amazingly well-told The Lives Of Others is one of those movies that forces you to think about the present, and ask questions about the nature of authority in our own lives, even as you absorb a totalitarian horror story from 20 years ago.
The movie is set in East Germany, five years before the fall of The Wall, in a society where hundreds of thousands were officially employed as "informers" to gather information on their fellow citizens. If you wanted a well-paying job with career advancement prospects, it's what you did.
On one level, it's the story of a functionary whose soul comes alive by exposure to art -- absorbed, like second-hand smoke, in the act of surveillance.
On another, it's about the Kafka-esque impossibility -- in a society that embraces authority a little too much -- of "keeping your nose clean" when somebody "up there" is determined to get you. Von Donnersmarck juggles these themes and others with sardonic humour, horror and tension in perfect proportion. It is an emotionally powerful movie that doesn't leave you when you walk out the theatre doors.
As the film opens, we meet Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulriche Muhe), a teacher of young prospective agents for the Stasi secret police. As he plays his class a tape of his relentless interrogation of a man who helped another defect to the West, we also flash back in cuts to the actual event. What emerges is a functionary so sure of himself and so zealously committed that it's hard to imagine he could ever waver.
And yet, when he's assigned to get dirt on a seemingly unimpeachable subject, the seeds of doubt are sown. Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is considered the ideal socialist playwright -- a committed intellectual, charismatic and co-operative with the ministries that scrutinize the arts for anti-socialist ideas.
The trouble is, Dreyman's live-in girlfriend, an actress named Christa-Maria Seyland, has caught the fancy of a piggish government minister (Thomas Thieme). He gives orders to have Dreyman railroaded to get him out of the way (although in the meantime, he's content to extort sex out of Christa-Maria by threatening to make public her addiction to drugs).
Thus does Wiesler find himself holed up in an attic, creepily listening in on Dreyman's life. Shaken by the venality of his assignment, he begins to absorb his subject's bourgeois values -- to the point that a Beethoven sonata finally breaks him and reduces him to tears (an unforgettable scene in the movie).
To be an artist in Dreyman's world proves creepy indeed. A joke at a party can end up ruining your career. Your most trusted friend can be an informer. Eventually, the naive playwright crosses the line, leading the still-invisible Wiesler to a potentially career-ending crisis of conscience of his own.
The entire saga is magnificently put together, beginning to end. Though Dreyman is the subject, in the end The Lives Of Others is Wiesler's movie, with Muhe giving the sort of achingly nuanced performance that would have clinched an Oscar nomination if any academy member had seen it.
BOTTOM LINE: A jarring, creepy, often sardonically funny and always frightening portrait of life in a country where "government informer" was one of the only dependable career options. Emotionally moving, beautifully acted and written, this Academy Award nominee for best foreign film deserves even more kudos.
(This film is rated 14-A)
More Movie Reviews
