Testa's Takes: 'The lives of others'

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

By Matthew Testa

‘The Lives of Others’

Written and Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
With Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme

When we first meet Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), the central figure in this year’s Oscar winner for best foreign film, “The Lives of Others,” he is instructing a class of students in the fine art of interrogation.

Wiesler is a master on the subject and a loyal agent with the East German Stasii, the infamous secret police whose job it was to rout out and punish anyone exhibiting the slightest opposition to communism in the dark days of the former German Democratic Republic.

Wiesler plays an audiotape for the budding recruits of one of his successful interrogations (as we flash back to it, we get the feeling all his interrogations are successful.) He points out to the class that his subject, suspected of being a subversive, shows in his answers signs of arrogance, intellectualism and free-will.

To an oppressive Soviet-bloc nation, these personality traits are the very foundation of crimes against the state. They are also, of course, some of the foundations of humanity.

With cool and remorseless efficiency, Wiesler interrogates his subject for hours, eventually getting him to betray his fellow intellectuals and activists. The guilty man is escorted from the room, after which Wiesler cuts the fabric from the interrogation chair and bottles it in a jar. A student asks him why. “For the dogs,” he replies.

Just as a dog can be conditioned to either hunt people or be man’s best friend, the middle-aged Wiesler appears to have been molded into a one-dimensional tool of the state. He is unquestioningly loyal, single, meticulous and expressionless.

So when his ladder-climbing superior officer, Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), needs someone to spy on a successful playwright and his beautiful actress wife, he calls on Wiesler, his top man.

The playwright is Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), by all accounts a loyal party member whose works uphold the supposed glories of Stalinism. But who could be more suspicious than a successful intellectual, no matter how politically loyal?

Wiesler gladly takes the assignment and sets up an elaborate, Soviet-era web of listening devices in the flat Dreyman shares with his leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).

Gradually, Wiesler’s resentment of the artists turns to envy and then, unexpectedly, to sympathy. He comes to see the humanity inherent in their pursuit of knowledge, expression and beauty and it awakens a long-dormant humanity in him.

Once Wiesler realizes his assignment has more to do with a Stasi-boss’s infatuation with Christa-Maria than it does with state business, he begins using his position to protect the couple.

Until this point, Dreyman, like Wiesler, has been devoted to the state. But the two characters arrive at disillusionment for similar reasons and then, independently, realize that subversion is their only moral option.

This wonderful film has so much going for it you’ll probably feel that one viewing wasn’t enough. It succeeds as both a Cold War thriller and a character-driven story of solitude, yearning and transformation.

Without being pious or mawkish, it celebrates humanity while lamenting the waste of talent and individuality that accompany a system that demands loyalty without question and servitude without freedom of thought.
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Testa's Takes: 'The lives of others' | Planet JH News Article: Movie Reviews

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