The Lives of Others - out now
Set in former East Germany during the early eighties, The Lives of Others, debut of writer-director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, is a far cry from the cheery Ostalgie nostalgic style of Goodbye Lenin and Sonnenallee. Rather it portrays a land controlled by the Stasi, the East German Secret Police, where no-one can trust their neighbour, or even their other half. The film stars Ulrich Mühe, who as State Security Captain Gerd Wiesler is given the task of monitoring one of the country’s most prominent playwrights, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his glamorous girlfriend Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck), who plays the leading role in his current play.
Wiesler, a model Stasi officer and something of a loner, believes passionately in the communist regime under which he serves, and the play opens with a terrifyingly sequence in which he instructs other party recruits in the art of interrogation, using as his guinea pig a young man accused of attempting to escape to the West. It is the small details that are the most chilling, such as when Wiesler tells his students to make sure their victims keep their sweaty hands on the chair, so that the tracker dogs can pick up their smell for future reference. At first wholly detached, as Wiesler surveys the couple he becomes entwined in the passion and betrayal of Christa and Georg’s relationship, and is moved to question the tyranny of the state to whose service he has dedicated his whole life. Muhe’s performance is riveting; his minimal command of expression in the film has been hailed as a “a triumph of muted grandeur” by the Austin Chronicle. He succeeds in communicating the feelings of Wiseler, buried under layer upon layer of drilling, training and attention to protocol with the smallest of facial gestures and expressions.
Gedeck gives a formidable performance as the glamourous Christa-Marie, trapped in a self-loathing affair with a repugnant Party official in order to retain her career and feed her addiction to contraband Western prescription drugs. Sebastian Koch likewise is warm and convincing as the charming playwright who is smugly proud of the fact that he is able to rebel against the state in his own quiet way; his Brechtian conceptions tick several Party boxes whilst still finding success with Western liberal audiences. The way in which he attempts to remove thespian colleagues from the Party blacklist and even has a paper published in the West denouncing the GDR, whilst apparently clinging to his supporters in the leadership, forces us to question his moral judgement, something that he apparently never does.
Hats must go off to Mühe’s Wiesler. In a role that is largely silent, he shows the struggles of an idealist who tries at all times to repress his own feelings, yet becomes emotionally involved in the anguish of two strangers to the point where he can no longer escape.
Von Donnersmark never lets us escape the sinister gloom of the GDR, nor does he give us glib answers to its horrors – everyone, good and bad alike, is culpable in some way. Yet he does hold out a lifeline: that however corrupt East Germans became in their willingness to comply with the Secret Police, even hardliners like Wiesler had an kernel of compassion buried deep somewhere in their hearts, which arguably contributed to the eventual collapse of the regime.
