Lives of Others - Movie Review

The Lives of Others got the Best Foreign Film award at the 2006 Oscars and I have rarely seen an award which was as richly deserved. The Lives of Others is set in the final years of East Germany amidst the paranoia and corruption which the communist regime had sunk into. Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is an ace investigator and interrogator in the Stasi, who has been assigned the role of surveillance of a top dramatist Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) to ascertain his political leanings. Dreyman is suspected of having anti-left beliefs and Muhe’s boss wants to lock him up at the slightest hint of being anti-left. Muhe’s boss is also sleeping with Dreyman’s girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), a decent if struggling actress, using his coercion and influence in getting her roles in government funded plays and letting her have her daily dose of amphetamines/ drugs.

Wiesler, in the first scene, is shown as a canny, relentless and ruthless interrogator who has completely bought into the communist regime’s thought control. However as he proceeds on his surveillance, he gradually realizes the power of art, the limits of his own belief in communism and the subversion of his ideals (where he has to veritably act as pimp delivering D’s wife into the hands of his boss).

The movie is an intense subliminal thriller and keeps you guessing what Dreyer’s true political beliefs are until late in the movie. It is like a horror movie where one jumps up at the sound of something in the kitchen and happy that it is a cat. Similar the audience is drawn into being a voyeur, watching with bated breath whether Dreyer is going to say something in the next line or next scene and get arrested by the Stasi. Finally when the scene passes, you rest back in your chair and glow in the director’s subtle manipulative genius. The screenplay is fantastic in its plotting of the gradual but subtle changes in characters. The denouement when it comes is melancholic but uplifting.

The movie main’s focus is on the totalitarian regime’s breakdown; Wiesler is a left leaning, unquestioning citizen in East Germany who flips finally onto the other side over the moral corruption he has to endure just like the vast majority of the population leading to 1989. But the movie is as much about the redemptive power of great art. A key turning point in the movie is where Dreyer and friends are listening to a piano piece entitled “Sonata for a good man” and Wiesler in his surveillance center is listening on with his headphones. The conversation goes “Lenin said ‘Anyone who creates such music can’t be evil’. Similarly for Wiesler, a great wordsmith like Dreyer can’t be evil.

Ulrich Muhe has given one of the most brilliant and controlled performances I have seen in recent years. He has an impassive face throughout and hardly has any dialogues, but manages to convey his feelings with a minor pause in words and movements, a gleam or sorrow in his eyes and a fine and compact body language. In a tragic coincidence, in real life, Muhe was an East German actor apparently being spied on by his wife under the East German government. He finally found this out when the state records were opened after the German unification. Muhe died from cancer, shortly after the release of the movie.

Lives of Others is by far, one of the most fulfilling movies I have seen in ages.