Only the Stasi Knows
The German film THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Das Leben der Anderen) is a film about the isolation, paranoia and confusion of living in a police state. In pre-unified Berlin the Stasi, the secret police of Germany’s GDR, was the a ‘big brother’ type organization that kept everyone who potentially posed a threat to socialism under surveillance. It’s a theme that rings loudly juxtaposed against today’s post-9/11 climate and the current American administration or even the McCarthyism of decades past. That may be why the film was so popular among American critics and at the Academy Awards where writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took home the award for BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM.
An excerpt from the related wikipedia entry:
The thriller/drama is about the cultural scene of East Berlin, monitored by secret agents of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his chief officer Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as a prominent actress and his lover, Christa-Maria Sieland.
The film was released in Germany on March 23, 2006. At the same time the screenplay was published by Suhrkamp Verlag.
On a global basis, The Lives of Others grossed more than 60 million US dollars as of May 2007. A possible Hollywood remake is said to be in the works, with Anthony Minghella or Sydney Pollack directing.
The movie touches on a number of themes, mainly lust, abuse of power, and the flipside to monitoring ‘the lives of others’ when the character Gerd Wiesler (Agent “HGW XX/7″) becomes somewhat emotionally attached to the people he’s been assigned to spy on. He becomes aware that his ‘mission’ to expose a suspected anti-communist sympathizer is nothing more an attempt to set-up a potentially innocent man. Thus, Gerd, initially a firm supporter of the Socialist Party, loses faith in his mission, choosing instead to protect the man he was deployed to frame. When the lover of the accused playwright Georg Dreyman is turned against him by the Stasi, Gerd must make a choice between his allegiance to the state and justice.
The mise en scène of the film excellently relates the feeling of what it must have been like to live under constant surveillance during those years and does an even better job at revealing what the corrupt bureaucracy of the GDR ranks may have been like. It’s an excellently directed film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommended.
