The Lives of Others

I first heard of The Lives of Others at the Oscars in February, when it took home the award for Best Foreign Language Film over the expected winner, Pan's Labyrinth. It's not very often that I get to watch a foreign film, but after hearing such rave reviews about The Lives of Others on various Washington Post movie chats, I decided to give it a viewing—and I have to say, this has proven to be one of the most powerful films I've seen in a long time, probably since I saw Crash in the theaters!

The Lives of Others (which is actually titled Das Leben der Anderen in German) takes place in East Berlin in the year 1984. Even before the first shot opens into view, we're treated to a text prologue that sets a very firm tone—one that's very dark, chilling, and dare I say, resigned and devoid of hope: the year is 1984, and glasnost is a loooooooooong way off. The German Secret Police, known as the Stasi, monitor anyone not faithful to the State, and their stated purpose is "to know everything" about everyone in East Berlin (and likely in all of East Germany, too).

The way of life under the Stasi is an unexpected twist on what I'm used to with respect to films that take place in Germany—i.e., stories that take place under the Nazi regime during World War II. And when talking Cold War movies, usually I think of Soviet Russia. Never once did it occur to me to hear a tale of Communist-controlled East Germany during the '80s. The parallels between the two Communist nations are very striking, too: the Party (or the State) is the most important thing, and everyone must be loyal to the State or else you're branded as a traitor and thrown in jail. Life in this police-state is very repressed, and blacklists are very common—even for the smallest offense. Take this very unsettling scene here, for example.



(In case you couldn't read the super-small subtitles, a lower-class worker tells a joke about the Party leader, and the Stasi member sitting at his table decides to play with him a little bit, first by encouraging him to tell the joke, then doing a complete 180 and saying that his career is done—but then turning right around and saying he's just kidding. All the same, this exchange scares the living wits out of the lower-class worker, and this scene illustrates the extremely slippery slope that people lived with when speaking out against the State and its leaders.)

In many ways, The Lives of Others bears a great resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, insofar as a detached, dispassionate surveillance man begins to question his work due to unforeseen circumstances, and begins to get involved with the people he's spying on. And his involvement has the potential to shatter not only these other people's lives, but also his own. For here in The Lives of Others, Gerd Wiesler is a career Stasi agent, and his loyalty to the State is so strong that he follows protocol at the expense of everything else in his life: he has no wife, no family; all his friends are Stasi members; he's essentially a loyal subject leading a sterile, bland, and very lonely life of blind obedience. And in an early scene where he's teaching a course on proper interrogation, he actually red-flagged a student who questioned the morality of harsh interrogation methods.

After seeing a stage play with his boss, Grubitz, he's ushered in the general direction of playwright Georg Dreyman, to see if his loyalty to the State is as firm as everyone believes. The recommendation to spy on Dreyman comes from Minister Bruno Hempf, who's having a fling with Dreyman's girlfriend, actress Christa-Maria Sieland. Wiesler may not be a rocket scientist, but he's definitely smart enough to see that this is a personal thing for the Minister—get Dreyman out of the picture so the Minister can get the girl. Grubitz, on the other hand, has another motive for bugging Dreyman: it aides in the suppression of the arts, and by extension, free thinking. There's a long scene where he describes the different "types" of artists and how they respond to interrogation, mostly along the lines of them never writing again because they've been so broken by their experience, no matter how tame.

But Wiesler, being the loyal subject that he is, doesn't give that any mind, so he and his crew set up "Operation Lazlo" by bugging the living hell out of Dreyman's apartment. Wiesler then sets up shop in a nearby room so he can eavesdrop on Dreyman and Christa-Maria, and types up general reports on their daily activities—which really don't amount to much, let alone anything treasonous. Then one day Dreyman gets news that his friend, Albert Jerska, has committed suicide, and it sets off a moral conflict inside Dreyman, because a number of years ago, Jerska was blacklisted by the Stasi for making borderline inappropriate remarks against the State, and Jerska was one of East Berlin's best stage directors. This gets Dreyman to thinking about the suicide rates in East Berlin, and to how much life under Stasi rule is a contributing factor. The problem is, that kind of subject matter is banned in East Berlin (as it would be considered slanderous to the State), so his only avenue of publishing is to get it to a publisher in West Berlin—which in and of itself is no easy task, as this was the era of the Berlin Wall.

Thus begins Dreyman's so-called turning against the State, and at the same time, Wiesler the observer begins to have a crisis of conscience, too, because I think his spying brings him unexpectedly close to this couple, so that in the end he's created a kind of voyeuristic intimacy with them to fill the void left by his loneliness. He even reaches out one night to Christa-Maria in a coffee shop, simply as a fan of her acting. But he also has to wrestle with his professional responsibilities, and even has the chance to play god, as it were. At one point, he caused the doorbell to ring at the precise moment Christa-Maria arrived home with Minister Hempf, thus bringing that affair into the light. And much later, Wiesler's crisis of conscience causes him to intervene at a very key moment, with shocking results that nobody could have expected.

All throughout the film, a sense of hopelessness and despair reigned, and the soundtrack, the camerawork, and especially the acting reflected this sense to a T. I can't say I'm familiar with all the principal actors here, but their performances were spot-on all around! Dreyman was perfectly subtle, Wiesler was ramrod-straight but cracking ever so gradually, and Christa-Maria was conflicted but resigned to her fate. And I have to say, the conversation that took place between Dreyman and Christa-Maria, where he finally tells her that he knows about her affair with Minister Hempf, was the most magnificent scene of the whole film. I would have given both actors Oscars just for that scene alone. I wish the soundtrack could have received an Oscar nomination as well, as each note perfectly fit the melancholy despair of the film.

But very subtly, The Lives of Others asks some very serious questions about what people are willing to sacrifice to comply with the law of the land, what expense these sacrifices take on the human soul, and what it means to be true to yourself. A perfect 10.