The Lives of Others
East Berlin, 1984. Gerd Wiesler is a Stasi captain, a perfect servant of the system, who teaches young officers how to break a suspect in interrogation. He is assigned to spy on Georg Dreyman, a successful playwright loyal to the regime, and his partner, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. The apartment is wired, and Wiesler sits in the attic with headphones, listening to every conversation, every argument, every moment of love. And slowly, listening to these lives, he starts to change.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made this as his first feature, and it is a near-perfect film. The grey, oppressive look of East Berlin is recreated with great care, and the story is constructed like a thriller, with real suspense. But its heart is Ulrich Mühe as Wiesler, a performance of total stillness, a man whose face hardly moves while everything inside him is shifting. Mühe had himself been under Stasi surveillance in the GDR, and he died the year after the film's success.
It is a film about how a totalitarian state invades private life, but also about the power of art: a piece of music, a book of poems, the idea of a "Sonata for a Good Man" that can change someone's heart. The final scene, in a bookshop, years later, is one of the most beautiful endings I know. It won the Oscar. A masterpiece.
