The Lives of Others (2006) dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
1984. East Berlin. Stasi is key compenent of the state's repression of the people, and it keeps growing every year, now spanning several hundred thousand employees and informants. Gerd Wiesler is an experienced Stasi officer, skilled in both surveillance, interogation and teaching of new Stasi operatives. He is ordered by his friend and superior Grubitz, to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman. A man who seems a model East German citizen. No known history of ever saying anything controversial about East Germany or communism. Wiesler is intrigued by the case, and wants to do the surveillance personally. He is however diasppointed, when he learns the real reason for the surveillance is not any concrete suspicions towards Dreyman. It's however ordered directly by the minister of culture, Bruno Hempf, who is interested in Dreyman's girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. This knowledge leads Wiesler to gain sympathy for Dreyman and Sieland. Which at first leads him to orchestrate that Dreyman discovers the affair between Sieland and Hempf, but he also convinces Sieland to return to Dreyman. Later it causes Wiesler to conceal Dreyman writing an anti-East German article, which is published in a West German paper.
In a morbid sort of way, I find Stasi very interesting. It's an organisation which grew very fast in few years, and was an ever growing bureaucracy, and often Stasi itself, was what was fueling it's every expanding bureaucracy. It's seems to be me, that it was an organisation which had an ever growing internal paranoia. It saw anti-communist behaviour and dissenters everywhere. It was only a matter of catching them in the act. This paranoia required more surveillance, more informants, more agents. This caused more arrest which caused more paranoia etc. I was in Berlin last fall, and visited the Stasi museum in their old headquarters. It was a scary and enlightening experience, and I would recommend it to anyone who ever goes to Berlin. I couldn't imagine a better movie about the topic than The Lives of Others.
The Lives of Others show the difference between two principal types of people working in this sort of system, and what happens when they clash. The true believers so to speak. Those who believe that the surveillance is of great importance, and always righteus and justified. That's Wiesler. Then there's the politicians. Those who see it for the political tool that it is, and how it can be used and abused for their own gain. That's Grubitz and Hempf. At the begining of the film Wiesler can almost be considered a worker bee who knows only how to execute the Stasi handbook and the law. But being confronted with the political reality of his assignment forces him to reevaluate what it is he is doing. It causes him to gain a conscience. Seeing this change is Wiesler is impressively powerful. Often it wouldn't be a compliment if one of the most tense moments of a film was a character writing two sentences on a typewriter. But here that's the case, and it's a great compliment to the filmmakers. Seeing Wiesler write an incorrect report for the first time is a great moment in the film, and shows the change he has been undergoing.
I doubt The Lives of Others is gonna leave my mind any time soon. It's a very powerful movie, which never overplays it's hand. The story and direction is underplayed, it allows the story to develop slowly, and for the viewer to develop their own ideas concurrently with the movie.
