The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen) - Film Review
It is 1984. The totalitarian state of paranoia and terror George Orwell immortalized in his cautionary tale half a century ago is really happening right in front of our eyes. This is East Germany, where Stasi, the ruthless GDR secret police, “shield and sword” of the regime, spies on its citizens to find everything there’s to know about “the lives of others” by wiring apartments, tapping phone lines, and turning family members, friends, neighbors and colleagues into informants. It is estimated that some 102,000 Stasis and as many as 2 million informants have been recruited to espionage and oppress the 17 million population over four decades. Violators of the GDR criminal code, such as “Treasonable Relaying of Information” (talking to a journalist from West Germany), “Treasonable Agent Activity” (planning immigration to West Germany) or spreading “propaganda hostile to the state” (criticism of a party member) are to be severely “corrected”. This all in the name of “protecting the party and the state”.
Enter the perfect couple Georg Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland: He is a successful playwright with a spotless record in the eye of the party, and she is a famous stage actress beloved by the nation and coveted by the smeary Minister of Culture. Living under the same roof, they lead a seeming happy and carefree life.
Enter Gerd Wiesler the Stasi officer, a surveillance expert, interrogation specialist and a quiet, lonely man. More importantly, Wiesler is a patriot who believes in his country and is determined to weed out all enemies of socialism.
When assigned to put Dreyman the playwright under his surveillance, Wiesler executes his task with cold conviction and immaculate precision. Every room in the apartment is tapped, the buzzer and phone line rewired, the doorway video monitored, and the neighbor duly warned. In the deserted attic directly over the suspect’s apartment, equipment is set up, the apartment layout mapped and chalked on the wooden floor, and the duty divided into 12-hour shifts between Wiesler and a subordinate. The attic becomes Wiesler’s second home, where he listens to every word said and pictures every move made. As he transcribes the private lives of Dreyman and Sieland day and night, something starts to change inside Wiesler.
Wiesler and Dreyman would never meet, yet both men would leave a powerful imprint on each’s life . As Wiesler ascertains that Dreyman has never been anything but loyal to his country, and that the order for his surveillance is purely personal, his attitude towards his party is quivered. As much as Wiesler believes in loyalty to his country, he also believes in loyalty to the one you love. That is why he lets Dreyman find out about Sieland’s clandestine affair with the Minister of Culture. When the heavyhearted Dreyman plays on his piano “Sonata of the Good Man”, a gift from a friend/mentor who’s just committed suicide, a tear trickles down on Wiesler’s otherwise stoic and expressionless face , overpowered by the music, immersed in Dreyman’s grief. Through the music he feels what Dreyman feels, not only because Dreyman is a just and loyal man Wiesler can identify with, but also for the first time, Wiesler finds a friend he’s come to care about. When he reads Brecht’s poetry which he took from the wired apartment, It is Dreyman’s voice he hears in his head. Dreyman, on the other hand, also gradually becomes disheartened about the system that he once so firmly believed in and openly supported after findoug out about his girlfriend’s affair and his friend’s suicide. Wiesler undergoes the transformation alongside with Dreyman privately, quietly, and is to become the guardian angel of a man whose life he was set out to destroy.
The paths of Wiesler and Sieland cross thrice. On a fateful night both of them stumble into the same joyless bar, a downcast Wiesler having just listened to a confrontation between the artists couple, and a forlorn Sieland on her way to meet the Minister of Culture, with whom she carries on an affair only out of fear for her career. Although Wiesler has already manipulated the outcome of events in Dreyman and Sieland’s lives before, he has never had direct contact with the unsuspecting couple. But he downs his Cognac and appraoches Sieland. Carefully, comprehensively, he introduces himself as her fan and pleads with her to be herself and remember her audience. “You are a great artist, don’t you know that?” Wiesler asks at the end of their brush, to which Sieland answers, “And you are a good man.” The next day when he learns that Sieland went back to Dreyman after their conversation at the bar and promised to never see the Minister again, you can see the hushed happiness on his face, a happiness that comes from having made a difference that he’s not supposed to, and more importantly, someone else is happy because of him. The wrath of the Minister, however, brings the two together again, this time in the Stasi prison. Wiesler is forced to get the word out of Sieland where an incriminating evidence against Dreyman is hidden. While Wiesler threatens and coaxes, he pleads with Sieland again to be herself and remember her audience, a hidden message imploring her to do the right thing, a secret code the onlookers on the other side of the mirror cannot decrypt. The look on Wiesler is of both shock, numbness and grief as Sieland makes her choice, which leads to a third brief encounter that would part them forever.
The Lives of Others is a moving story about being human under inhuman circumstances. It is about a bound between two men that have never meet each other, yet which exists only between the best of friends. First time director and screenplay writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck patiently observes his characters and subtly affirms that a human soul is capable of triumphing over a system that tyrannizes it. The sternly unsentimental, understated final scene will be a heartwarming experience you are not likely to forget for a very long time.
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