Movies |
The Lives of Others
By
Published: Oct 22, 2023
Category:
Drama
Guess what city has more surveillance cameras than another other? Would you believe… London? In East Germany in the 1980s, there was no tech, so the Stasi — the secret police — had 90,000 employees and 173,000 informers. In a country of 16 million people, that’s huge; it means that one of every 63 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi. “The Lives of Others,” directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2007.
Today, our first thought is: What does spying do to the victims?
von Donnersmarck flips the question: What does spying do to the people who do it?
He asks this question in the simplest possible way. Georg Dreyman is a successful playwright, and not just in the theater. He’s respected by his peers and tolerated by the government: “the only non-subversive writer we have.” He lives with an actress, a great beauty who has the misfortune to come to the attention of a government official. He knows he couldn’t seduce her on the strength of his own charm — but what if he got Georg Dreyman out of the way?
Problem: there’s no dirt on Dreyman.
But in the down-is-up world of dictatorships, that only proves he’s guilty of…. something. And so, in the way that officials use their power for personal gain, the Stasi assigns Capt. Gerd Wiesler to eavesdrop on Dreyman. Watch the trailer. [To rent the streaming video from Amazon, click here.]
Dreyman is a good man. As is Weisler. And the more Wesler learns about Dreyman, the more he admires him. But that, of course, is not what his assignment is about.
We may think of oppressive regimes as soul killers that strip choices from the lives of their people. That is how many Germans explain their conduct during the Nazi decades. But that’s not true. We have choices, all of us, each and every minute. And that is what makes this thrilling movie so powerful — we see the effect of his nasty work on Weisler. And how his concerns deepen as Dreyman undertakes some forbidden writing.
In “The Firm,” the greatest thrills occurred at a Xerox machine. In “The Lives of Others,” a typewriter is as dangerous as a gun. This is one tense, thought-provoking movie.
