Peter Bradshaw 

The Lives of Others

Peter Bradshaw: This fierce and gloomy drama ... was a notable winner of this year's best foreign film Oscar.
  
  

The Lives of Others
Deja view... The Lives of Others, out this week on DVD, drew more than one million British visitors Photograph: PR

Nothing could provide a more effective antidote to Ostalgie - that is, the tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for the days of the Berlin wall in which educated Germans are said sometimes to indulge. This fierce and gloomy drama, written and directed by first-timer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, was a notable winner of this year's best foreign film Oscar. It is an indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police, whose tentacular network of informers was so vast that fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll - a network of fear and shame worthy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A handsome, well-meaning but smug literary lion in mid-80s East Berlin, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), is churning out turgid and derivative sub-Brechtian plays set in quaintly imagined factories with characters occasionally delivering leaden choric monologues to the audience. Dreyman is mightily pleased with himself and his career, combining as he does a vacuous appeal to western liberals, with a shrewdly sycophantic acquaintance with the Honeckers.

He is passionately involved with his glamorous leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), but Christa is also secretly conducting a self-loathing affair with a bloated party bigwig who is promising her career advancement in the state-sponsored world of the arts, and guaranteeing her access to forbidden western prescription drugs, to which she has become hopelessly addicted. Fanatically jealous of Dreyman, the official sets a Stasi officer to bug the playwright's apartment and find a pretext to fling him into prison. The Stasi functionary is Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a cold-fish type who becomes an insidious voyeur, spying on Georg and Christa's relationship. He finally becomes moved to question the state tyranny to whose service he has dedicated his whole life.

The Lives of Others is a very different experience to Good Bye Lenin!, the funny and much-admired satire from 2003 on East Germany's collapse which, frankly, came close to indulging the shabby communist regime. This movie begins with a frighteningly horrible sequence in which Captain Wiesler questions a hapless young man suspected of helping a friend escape to the west. The ruthless grilling is intercut with his lecture to new Stasi recruits in which this interrogation has become a set-text: the man's pleas, screams and sobs are replayed on tape to the earnest young students. There is a particularly queasy detail concerning the vital importance of making all terrified suspects keep their sweaty palms pressed to the seat of their chair: it is so that a sample of sweat can be kept on an impregnated cloth, in case it has to be given to the tracker dogs.

In a way, nothing in Donnersmarck's intensively crafted liberal tragedy compares to the horror of that single moment. The storyline offers a kind of redemption: the possibility that, however culpable and corrupt the East German nation became through its complicity with the Stasi, a tiny but imperishable capacity for decency - even at the highest, chilliest levels of the secret police - was what finally consigned the regime to history. That could be true; or perhaps simple exhaustion and self-disgust caused it to collapse, which is harder and less gratifying to dramatise.

Either way, the narrative progression is shaped by the thawing of Captain Wiesler's sinister professionalism. At first utterly detached, he develops a malign and morbid interest in revealing to Dreyman that Christa is having an affair. From his makeshift surveillance station in the building's attic, he rigs the doorbell so that it will ring repeatedly and bring Dreyman down to the apartment's main door and see Christa getting out of a party limousine. From there, Wiesler becomes involved in the passion, anguish and eroticism of their relationship, and increasingly aware of the utter nullity of his own existence.

Martina Gedeck gives a typically pungent and charismatic performance as the sexy, venal Christa - and I wonder if that first name was not chosen to recall, faintly, the East German author Christa Wolf, who in the 1990s was revealed to have been an informant for the Stasi, before she herself came under scrutiny. As so often, Gedeck creates a blowsy, almost pornographic sensuality on screen, and it is easy to imagine the weakness and narcissism that caused Christa to cooperate with the secret police.

Sebastian Koch's Dreyman is a less satisfying character. He is the flawed good guy who begs the authorities to remove errant theatrical comrades from the blacklist, and who winds up writing a sensational article for the western press, denouncing the GDR. But he is never shown examining his own choices and does not obviously reproach himself for kowtowing to the party's big cheeses.

The big, showy emotional setpieces of this film are robustly staged and powerfully acted, though not as telling as the little details. An incautious Stasi official is shown telling a joke in the staff canteen about Erich Honecker: the party chairman, the joke goes, greets the sun with a cheerful "Good morning!", to which the sun replies obediently at various stages of the day, except when it sets in the evening, when it jeers: "Screw you, I'm in the west now!" Horribly, this party official is later shown reduced to humiliatingly minor clerical duties, presumably because of this one, ill-timed joke. The pettiness, the spite and the quiet desperation of East Germany are all there in that desolate punchline.

 

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