Beautifully restrained study of moral complexity and totalitarianism

The Lives of Others/Das Leben der Anderen—the title of this striking German film points to the vicariousness of a world dominated by suspicion and surveillance. In East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down the STASI, the state police, wanted to watch everyone. In 1984 a file is opened and STASI men are set to work watching a man and a woman who are above reproach. In the paranoid world of the eastern zone, innocence itself, as in Kafka, is suspicious. In charge of the case, code name “Laszlo,” is a certain Weisler (Ulrich Mühe). And those thoroughly bugged and listened to day and night are Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a noted playwright, friend of the Chancellor, politically correct in the eyes of the regime, and his beloved girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), a famous actress. Behind this particular project are political higher-ups, sly and manipulative, jealous of each other’s positions, kingpins of a system that in a few years will toss them out. This is a paranoid 1984 not far from the one Orwell imagined. When Weisler’s men bug Dreyman’s flat, the lady across the hall sees them. Weisler tells her if she speaks a word to anybody, her daughter will be thrown out of the university. One of the officials wants Christa-Maria. Now that she is vulnerable, on the examination table, so to speak, he can move in on her. It’s only a matter of time before somebody will be begging for mercy.

Weisler is a rigid mole, but he has sensitive eyes. Like the Wall itself, his vision will crumble and we will see it happen. Weisler is a teacher in the police school, but Dreyman’s life becomes his teacher. Dreyman is tall and glamorous. He sheds his middle class origins by never wearing a tie. He makes love to a beautiful woman who Weisler later declares to be a great artist. Weisler has to make do with flabby prostitutes on a tight schedule. Dreyman introduces Weisler to the humanizing value of music and poetry; he listens to a certain sonata, and he begins to read Brecht.

Weisler and Dreyman are both flawed heroes. The bad men are Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), Weisler’s threatening supervisor, and the loathsome "Culture" minister with police powers Bruno Hempf (Thomas Tieme).

The question may arise in our minds: if Dreyman’s so above reproach to the East Germans, how shall we admire him? But this film deals in nuances, moral ambiguities through which despair can turn to hope. The sonata was given to Dreyman for his birthday by a blacklisted friend and mentor, Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleimert), and Jerska’s suicide leads the playwright to risk smuggling facts and an impassioned protest to the West. Dreyman does become admirable to us. But so does Weisler, the STASI agent, because by this time he wants to protect the objects of his surveillance, and to protect them he arranges to be the only man on the case. Dreyman evades exposure through Weisler’s silent help. But there are casualties. Christa-Maris is catnip to the fat cats, and she’s caught in the middle. Weisler covers his tracks, but his superior knows he’s done something, and Weisler’s sent to steam open letters in a cellar for the rest of his career. It’s there that we see him get the extraordinary news four years later that the Wall is coming down.

The Lives of Others is free from the melodrama of pursuit and torture, but it knows the terror of the sudden house search, the second knock up on the door; of extortion, humiliation, and betrayal; the soul death of the creative person silenced, the calculated draining away of the will to act. It’s a movie of dignity and hope too, though it speaks of long gray subterranean exile. The music Jerska gave Dreyman is called The Sonata of a Good Man. A chance remark by one of the fallen officials years later leads Dreyman to track down the facts (accessible now) and to write about them. When Weisler speaks the film’s final lines, “It’s for me,” they’re among the most resonant in recent years. The Lives of Others is a little long in places – it threatens sometimes to morph into a mini-series – but its restraint and quietude make for an impressive cumulative effect, a sense of the prevailing grayness and rage totalitarianism generates. It’s specific to the place and time, but gracefully universal, and it reveals the tall German with the aristocratic name, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, to be a world-class director.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.