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Trailer for "The Lives of Others"

The Lives of Others, the celebrated German film that was awarded this year’s Oscar for best foreign film, offers an examination of the life of the artist under a systematically repressive regime, the German Democratic Republic, which fell with the Berlin Wall in 1989. Its director, the aristocratically monikered Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, has skillfully rendered an increasingly tense and involving drama of secrets, cruelly suppressed humanity, and courage. But its considerable appeal may obscure the film’s suppositions and forestall a consideration of them.

Set in 1984 in East Berlin, Lives centers on the surreptitious investigation of an unusually successful playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), by agents of the GDR’s secret police agency, the Stasi. The case is being managed by a particularly effective captain, Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a grimly dedicated, highly trusted man.

When he’s unexpectedly ordered to bug Georg’s apartment and begin surveillance of him, Wiesler proceeds in his customary coldly efficient fashion. Georg isn’t suspected of anything Wiesler is aware of, but he doesn’t require such information and he harbors a resentment and a suspicion of the bourgeois “arrogance” and individuality of such privileged people as the playwright and his lover, the leading actress Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). Soon he’s sitting in the attic of Dreyman’s apartment building, monitoring the couple. And, curiously, he seems to be increasingly interested in what transpires several floors below in something more than an official capacity.

Wiesler has seen Christa perform in Georg’s latest play in the company of his immediate superior and he has taken note of the government’s crudely cynical culture minister’s pursuit of the reluctant but intimidated actress. Indeed, it was the minister who ordered the surveillance. The real objective may be to eliminate the unsuspecting Georg as an impediment to the minister’s possession of his prey.

When Wiesler, in his monitoring aerie, intervenes to force the issue, he’s not only giving in to an unusual personal vulnerability, he’s setting in motion a course of events that will bring tragic ruin to one of the four, but defeat Wiesler’s own secret purpose. In a bitter-tinged, semi-triumphal irony, he also winds up assisting Georg in an act of protest against the state.

As political drama and, increasingly as it proceeds, melodrama, von Donnersmarck’s film succeeds admirably. The velvet trap Georg has found himself in, and the GDR’s malign corruption, are sketched persuasively. The details are pointed and convincing. The film calmly recreates a milieu, and unfolds its increasingly tense story within it. Von Donnersmarck’s East Berlin is a vaguely Orwellian, subtly stylized evocation of Stalinist suppression. Grey and dun-colored, the rooms the characters live and work in reflect a stifling kind of quasi-modernist brutal sensibility. (The contrast between Wiesler’s spare, alienating apartment and the couple’s homelike flat is aesthetically articulate.)

The performances are no small asset to the film. Mühr offers up a portrait of a man silently battling and then betraying his assiduously achieved identity. Mühr works with only a modicum of simulated affect and gestures, his voice and face almost never overtly emphasizing the passion he’s beginning to feel. The effect is a kind of moving minimalism. Gedeck poignantly conveys the anguish of weakness brutally exploited.

The Lives of Others is a moral thriller of unquestionable seriousness, but its aspirations may outrun its content to some extent. It’s possible to be impressed by the film’s impact and yet suspect it of a subtle exploitation of its own. It may work to flatter both its creator and its audience, and to privilege art—including film art—unrealistically.

At one point, Georg exclaims to Christa that it can’t be possible to really hear Beethoven’s Appassionata and do evil. (Above them, Wiesler has heard Georg playing the piano, and listened intently.) Maybe the playwright is right but it should give one at least brief pause to recall that some Nazis listened to Beethoven and that the famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler collaborated with them in order to go on conducting this music. Georg and von Donnersmarck’s point can seem a little ambiguous.

When we discover Wiesler reading a volume of Brecht’s little-known romantic poetry that the spy has pilfered from Georg’s apartment, the question that is highlighted is whether it’s art or his envious admiration for Christa that has so quickly altered his conduct. The film doesn’t really succeed in accounting for his change of heart, however much it makes us want to believe in it. And however tempting it is to believe in the transformative power of art in the face of organized inhumanity.