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Ulrich Mühe in “The Lives of Others”

FIRST-TIMER FLORIAN HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK SIGNS ONE OF THE BEST GERMAN FILMSOF THE DECADE

The first-timer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck signs one of the best German movies of the decade with ‘Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of the Others/A Vida dos Outros’, the best ever made in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Europe communist regime. ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ distinguished itself getting the public award at the festivals of Locarno, Warsaw and Vancouver, scoring a hit at the theaters in Germany. It was considered the best script and movie in 2006 by the members of the European Film Award. It was nominated for Best Foreign Picture for the Golden Globe and the Oscar Awards (and it really deserves to win). But it has been heard at the 57th Berlin Festival that Donnersmarck’s movie had been rejected by the selections of Berlin and Cannes last year, which seems astonishing.

The movie recreates the claustrophobic environment and the horror in East Berlin in 1984 during the so called Socialist regime of the Democratic German Republic. The government guarantees the surveillance of the imprisoned citizens thanks to Stasi’s espionage, surveillance and denouncement network. The movie begins with a psychological torture class ministered by Stasi’s captain Gerd Wieder (played by Ulrich Mühe). It is the most shocking exposure of a torture method ever taken to the movies.

We will follow the spy’s career all through the movie. And we will feel the depravity of a communist regime that avails itself of privileges to dominate subordinate citizens. The minister of East German Culture wants to have sex with theater actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), but she is married to the writer Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). The couple is an example of correction for the political party. They have always been in favor of the regime and use their talent to ennoble the socialism. However, the minister needs to undermine this solid base of marriage for him and for the regime. Thus, he asks the members of Stasi to disclose the couple’s privacy. It is necessary to create evidence against the artists and, if possible, unmask them as enemies of the system.

The wicked Stasi installs a sophisticated monitoring system in their apartment to spy on the couple. Captain Gerd Weider, unsuspected, is responsible for the surveillance and the reports of the expected evidence against them. That is when everything turns around in the movie, with a poignant script based on actual reports produced by this surveillance. These documents have been available to the public since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The spy becomes an important character who is in crisis against the real absolutists of the regime he supported and must go on pretending he still supports them. At this point, the movie becomes a moving scene of resistance, this time without the Manichaean clichés of good versus evil and vice versa.

As if the German guilt about the Nazism was not enough, here we have more absurdities of another Germany that changed the absolutist and fascist uniforms after World War II to socialist ones. With movies like this one, we understand how the Fascism settled down in Eastern Europe for so long and how the Gulag system in the concentration camps produced more victims than World War II.
Whoever sees ‘The Lives of the Others’ will never forget it. It is one of those rare movies that stick in your memory as a lesson of human dignity. To correct the mistake made last year, the 57th Berlin Festival programmed ‘The Lives of the Others’ to be shown at the German Cinema session. It still is the best German movie among the others Berlin selected in 2007.