As we are marking the fall of the Berlin Wall on Meet At The Gate this week with commentary of culture around Communism (and its fall), it's only proper that I highlight one of the best films made in recent years about life in Communist Europe — The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).
East German actor Ulrich Mühe stars as H.G. Wiesler, the coldly efficient Stasi captain who takes it upon himself to conduct a full surveillance of the writer Georg Dreyman after seeing his latest play. Through clever use of bugs and hidden cameras, Wiesler sees and hears almost everything.
The film is set in 1984, years before the end of the Cold War. Through Wiesler's eyes, we see the paranoia of the GDR and how intellectuals and artists are starved of the freedom they need to create. Wiesler — in his obsessive tracking of Dreyman's every word — seems to fall in love. Not with the man, but with the relative openness of his life and the interpersonal connections that Wiesler can only dream of.
(This is my only criticism of the film. I found it hard to believe that a man as experienced as Wiesler would connect and empathise so easily with his subject. Spoilers follow.)
In spite of Wiesler's newfound and one-sided relationship with the Dreyman household, the Stasi continues on its merry way and personal grievances doom Dreyman to being snitched on by his girlfriend, an actress who only wants to keep working. Wiesler is blamed for botching his surveillance of Dreyman and not noticing his subversive activities, and is condemned to working in the mail room for the rest of his career.
We have a 'happy' ending with The Lives of Others — the Wall comes down a few years later and Wiesler leaves the Stasi mail room, and Dreyman discovers the truth behind who 'saved' him back in 1984.
Emotionally, The Lives of Others hits all the right notes. A Stasi captain isn't someone with whom we would sympathise, but Mühe (who was himself surveilled by the Stasi starting from his student days) turns in a wonderfully-controlled yet emotional performance as a man who discovers a meaning to life that he had earlier dismissed.
The Lives of Others won seven Lolas (Germany's equivalent of the American Academy Awards), as well as the Best Foreign Film Oscar.
The Lives of Others or Das Leben der Anderen (2006)
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Starring: Ulrich Mühe, Ulrich Tukur, Sebastian Koch, and Martina Gedeck
