The Lives of Others

East Germany, 1984. The GDR holds it's populace in an iron fist of surveillance and fear via the Stasi (state security). Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is a high-ranking member of the Stasi who prompts the surveillance of one of the state's most popular playwrights, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). As Wiesler monitors the playwright he begins to learn of the higher-up motivations that greenlit such an investigation, and as a result he finds his beliefs in the GDR shaken to a point where he will have to choose between aiding subversive actions or betraying his own conscience.

Where do I start with this one? It's a fascinating recreation of a real-life European dystopia, conjuring up a frightening world via the drab decor of 1980s communist Germany and an obsessive eye for historical detail. There's something inherently sinister about the Stasi, the way they strive to know everything about the German populace and, by extension, police people's thoughts via implied threat. There's something masterful about the way this film evokes it's atmosphere of fear without resorting to brutality or gratuity. The key to it's thematic core is via the unassuming character of Wiesler - a man so obsessed with surveillance and loyalty to the state that he initiates the investigation of the country's only famous non-subversive writer.

Through Wiesler's case we are given a tertiary view of the men who wield power in this regime, and the way they amass it by accusing their colleagues of disloyalty or use information (truthful or constructed) to get what they want. The repulsively confident character of Minister Hempf gives Wiesler's investigation momentum only because he wants to get to Dreyman's girlfriend. Those within the Stasi who help him to this end can buy themselves favour, but it has little to do with socialism, especially when Wiesler finds his surveillance censored to keep the Minister's involvement unknown. It's this corruption of ideals that leads to Wiesler's disallusion and opens him up to compromise and subversion. It will also lead to a chain of events both tragic and upliftingly defiant.

The brilliance of The Lives of Others is the way that it takes a small story involving a handful of characters and opens it out to show the implications of how the Stasi and the GDR worked at the height of power. This is a country absolutely crushed under the weight of a form of tyranny that masquerades under idealogical double-speak. There's a great scene where a minor Stasi character attempts to tell a joke about the Minister and then tries to reign himself in when he realises one of his superiors is listening... the resulting conversation is a tense display of bully-tactics that echoes Joe Pesci's infamous "How am I funny?" scene in Goodfellas. It's frightening in a way that no horror film would ever be able to touch - the totalness of oppression is unescapable. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to live in such a police state, and it's amazing to think that it's really only been twenty years or so since the Berlin Wall came down and this regime came to a halt.

It's very easy to see why this movie won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but it's so much more than just that award. It won plaudits in Germany for daring to directly examine life in the GDR, something that had been shied away from or glossed over up until this film. Above all, it's a great drama with relevance and resonance, anchored to history and layered with irony and subtle emotional depth. One of the greater, more important films to come out of Europe in recent times.