Comments on new movie: 'The Lives of Others'

Comments on new movie: 'The Lives of Others' [2006]
dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Note: as this movie has only just been released in Australia, I'm not going to do a traditional type of review covering the whole story, but instead give comments on various features that most strongly interested or appealed to me.

My strongest impression of this film is the atmosphere it creates in the very first minutes: intense suspicion and fear. This is sustained right through the film, in various ways: not only by officers of the state security police known by its short name of Stasi, and by high-ranking political officials, but also by the civilians under surveillance. Throughout the story you can see that the constant presence of fear and suspicion and the widely-assumed knowledge the Stasi could be spying on you but not the certainty it was at any given moment, has different damaging effects on different characters. The precision and range of the note-taking, written reports and recording system used to kepe track of an entire population is vividly depicted. So much of the intimidaiotn is done by looks, gestures, casual comments, veiled threats and very little or nothing is directly managed by show of guns or snarling dogs. A quick through-the-lens tour of underground interrogation rooms and the snarling tone of officer Captain Gerd Wisler checking on an inquisitive tenant does more than enough to show how the police operate so effectively and are able to ruthlessly survey so many.

The dramatic content of the movie is based on a small group of characters: a few key Stasi officers, a high-ranking minister and some leading players in the East German theatre world who are constantly under threat of censorship and employment bans. They become increasingly bitter about the system and with each other. Georg Dreyman is a popular and 'loyal'
playwright, his mentor and close friend is an older director who has a famous past but apparently no real hope of a future. Dreyman's lover, Christa-Maria, is a talented and charismatic singer and artist with a secret life of her own. But it is the Stasi officer Gerd Wisler (noted above) who makes the first main appearance: he is the classic zipped-up soulless servant of the state machinery, capable of total ruthlessness on a daily basis and extremely efficient. He works hard to be feared as a cunning and tireless interrogator. Wisler's boss, Grubitz, is a long-time colleague and friend from police college days. Grubitz has a causal and even friendly superficial manner, but can also willingly wreck people and quickly distance himself from disgraced colleagues.

The drama really starts when Wisler is given a special surveillance assignment after teaching a class of aspiring students at the police college. After a night at the theatre, where Dreyman is directing a play, Grubitz has a chat with a high-ranking minister. He then authorises Wisler to start keeping a close watch on the playwright and find out if he really is still loyal or has some secret projects that could become security issues. Wisler's work on 'the operation' is what draws the viewer further into the story, and the reactions and experience of those being spied on show just how damaging life in the regime can be. In various ways they all become trapped in lies and ruses. No one can or will trust the motives of a neighbour behind a door. They start to hate themselves and sometimes even each other. Creativity falters and willpower wilts. Wisler and his junior colleague grimly maintain their lonely work. Sadness seeps into every thin apartment wall.

As the months and years grind on, a couple of supporting characters become angrier and more resourceful: that gives Dreyman some new hope of writing an important documentary piece that is not a play and must be smuggled to the West at all costs. Meanwhile, Grubitz and the minister become impatient with the lack of any significant new findings and mounting staff cost of the 24-hour surveillance. The danger increases, the stakes are raised and Wisler is made to feel the pressure on his own career and at possible cost of his friendship with Grubitz. This combination of streses has some strange effects on him: while wearing headphones and typing detailed reports as he listens in and occasionally exercises his ingenuity by setting traps, he hears music and comments that get past his professionally-trained instincts and thought patterns. At an advanced stage of surveillance, he finds he can no longer trust his original assumptions about the rightness or even ulitmate use of what he is doing. A very unexpected decision at a key stage in the operation shows that there is in fact some sort of human being behind the dress uniform he prefers for interrogations and the drab tracksuit he uses to travel to and from secret operations.
There is a brief period covering the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and what happens to the various main characters following that historical event. It also gives a fascinating glimpse of the sheer extent of highly personal archival material that becomes available to the citizens of the former GDR. The director and screenwriter resist the temptation to present affecting re-union scenes and instead offer different and quiter types of brighter moments.

Yes, there are flashes of humour, intense romance and short-lived celebration scenes, especially Dreyman's birthday party early in the story and much later celebrations about what was smuggled past the border... But these scenes also serve to highlight the daily dreariness, unknowable police actions, personal crises, slippery ideologies and ever-present fear. On screen, 'The Lives of Others' is a profound 'human interest' story made all the more powerful and fascinating by being directly based on a very real regime that still operated in unnervingly recent history.