Day 90: The Lives of Others (2006)

Movie #56 – The Lives of Others (2006) - 137 min, cert 15.

Gerd Wiesler is a captain in the Stasi, the East German secret police force, five years before the Berlin Wall came down. He takes on the task of monitoring a budding young playwright who appears to the authorities to be too good to be true. He toes the party line and seems happy to do so. Wiesler bugs his apartment and sits in a little attic room day after day listening in. He finds nothing – Dreyman, the playwright, really is as clean as he looks. Wiesler’s superior in the Stasi is having an affair with Dreyman’s girlfriend and tells Wiesler to find some dirt on him so he can be got out of the way. Wiesler objects to this and doesn’t come up with anything. Then when Dreyman writes a defamatory piece about the East German system and smuggles it out to be published in the West, Wiesler covers it up. Although Wiesler’s commander cannot prove his involvement, he knows what happened well enough and condemns Wiesler to a menial job for the rest of his career.

It’s a bit of a slow burner this one, and quite hard to follow at times. What makes it so hard is Wiesler’s utterly inscrutable expression throughout the movie. He has no family or friends that he can trust enough to talk to, so he doesn’t. Throughout the movie he hardly speaks, and makes few, if any, facial expressions. He knows that to betray the slightest suspicion can lead to being shipped off to a labour camp in the middle of the night. This means that the audience has to make up their own minds what he is thinking, purely by judging him through his actions.

Score – 8/10. It took a while to get into, but surprisingly good overall.

Next up is Fritz Lang’s M. It’s a very early talkie, and it’s in German with English subtitles.