The Lives of Others

This film was a nice surprise. Sure, it won the Best Foreign Film Oscar over Pan's Labyrinth last year, but I didn't really know what to expect. I hadn't read much about it prior to seeing it, so I was a clean slate ready for a fresh cinematic experience.

The film hinges on the motives of Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a German Democratic Republic interrogator/sound spy (for better lack of a description) who becomes entralled and intimately involved in the lives of two artists in 1980's East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. His motives are never really clear, and they change quickly and dramatically early into his observations in the room at the top of the artists' apartment building. Wiesler appears to be a hardened Socialist with little concern for the lives his interrogations and reports of his observations ruin. The film lets us know he's lonely when he asks a prostitute whose services he has just received to stay longer with him. He appears to be vulnerable for the first time, and soon he proves to be suceptible to the passion and love of the man and woman he is supposed to ruin. The junp creates an ambiguity of his motives. Does he change his political views, or is he merely so involved in the lives of his subjects that he begins to protect them from the law and themselves? Both? The change in the man is apparent, though I feel I needed more explanation for the change.

But I let myself suspend my disbelief and immerse myself in the human drama and suspense of the film. Particularly excellent are the scenes when Wiesler comes face to face with his subject, first with the woman in a bar, then with the woman in an interrogation room. My stomach was churning during the interrogation scene. Wiesler was forced to keep his loyalty to Socialism and prod the woman for information that he actually didn't want her to give. The worry hiding under his hardened facade as she begins to break is priceless and a triumph of acting, direction, and writing.

As his male subject joins the West Germany anti-Socialism movement, the stakes rise for each character - for the two artists, Wiesler, and his power-hungry superior. The suspense is always real because the performances are grounded in the reality of the time and the characters.

There were a few times during the many epilogues that I thought the film could have ended and would have been better for it, but the ending is earned and welcome. There were just a few too many "two years later..." or "seven years later..." or whatever time frames they included. I kept waiting for another one to pop up because it never seemed like the film would satisfy its need for closure.

***1/2