The Lives of Others
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
2006 – Germany
Rated R : 137 minutes
Vault Rating: 8
Vault has been stuck. It has taken us a month … A MONTH … to slog through a film we thought was essential viewing. More about David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” later, but let’s just say we trusted Manohla Dargis on this one.
We’ve seen other good films of late, though, stuck as we were, including today’s feature, “The Lives of Others.”
Almost Orwellian and strangely, distantly warning of the emerging security state in America, comes this Oscar winning film drawn from true stories from behind the Iron Curtain.
Set in 1980s East Berlin, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (Winning hands down the Video Vault award for “Strangest Director Name”) presents a spirit draining portrait of life under the watchful eye of the East German state police, called the Stasi.
The Stasi and its informers, a bureaucracy of some 300,000 existed with the sole aim of securing the state from within and without. We don’t know how many are employed, say, at the Office of Homeland Security, but there, as here, it doesn’t take long for a paranoid government to begin to suspect artists and peace activists and those ever niggling “enemies of the state,” however they might be defined.
In East Germany, secret files were kept on nearly everyone, tracking every citizen’s every move as if they might begin to overhear every seditious thought.
When highly successful, highly connected playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his companion Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) become the subject of the state’s secret surveillance, their friends, family and even those watching find their lives changed.
There is a series of curious scenes in the film at hand where mid-level functionaries looking to climb the ladder begin to focus on Dreyman, whose plays have never been offensive to the state.
“Perhaps he’s not as clean as he appears,” muses one boss to another. This simple scuttlebutt among party chiefs sets in motion an investigation aimed at the chance of a noteworthy arrest and bureaucratic advancement.
Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is put in charge of the investigation and we endeavor to eavesdrop with him. The actor, Muhe, is in a keen position to offer authenticity to the film, having himself lived under surveillance in East Germany and — after the fall of the Berlin Wall — was able to view his entire family’s file.
The lengths to which the Stasi went were surprising. People lived in constant fear of being taken in for the standard 48 hour interrogation. Homes were secretly bugged so that even the most intimate experiences and conversations could be intercepted. Police officials might be fairly amazed at how the Stasi used highly trained dogs as a kind of early lie detector.
The message, of course, is to show how security, lust for power and interrogation marry as the security state rises then rots in a marinade of fear.
In the fictional case of Georg Dreyman, Vault could not help but draw parallels between then East Germany and the present day United States. Innocents were arrested in widely cast nets and held without charge or due process such as in the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and countless, nameless others. We wonder why in our country that authorities find it necessary to infiltrate legitimate peace groups. We wonder why all the major telecommunications providers (Vault is planning to dump Verizon for its transgressions and get our cell service from Working Assets.) find it easy and necessary to turn over massive databases of phone records and emails to the government.
It is all enough to make a peace-loving film critic … We WERE talking about a film, weren’t we? … shudder. “The Lives of Others” is simultaneously a powerful history and a harrowing look ahead. It is strongly recommended.