Das Leben der Anderen (film review)
After a long slump, German cinema isn't doing badly at all these last few years. Yesterday I watched what is easily the best film, no matter which language, I've seen in a while, "Das Leben der Anderen" (literary translated "The Life of the Others", though who knows what they're going to call it when it gets released abroad - and make no mistake, this one has Oscar nomination for best foreign language written all over it!). Set in East Germany in the 80s, it has a simple story at its core: one of the higher-ups in the party falls for an actress who is involved with a writer. This being a dictatorship, the VIP tells the Stasi (= East German secret police) to put the writer under surveillance and to find something that implicates him as a traitor. The Stasi officer in charge of the surveillance begins to get more and more emotionally involved with both the actress and the writer the longer he spies on them....
Early on, the politician and the writer have a conversation which is crucial to the film. After congratulating the writer to his newest play, the politician tells him condescendingly they all love the writers' work because it tells the same story over and over again, that people can change. But of course, he adds, people can't. So this is the question for the film - can they? If so, how much? And what are they changing in to?
The Stasi officer, Wiesler (yes, that name associates "weasel" in German, too) is our main character, and the introduction we get to him is chilling, as he breaks a suspect by repeating the same questions to him again and again in a 48-hours interrogation. No physical force is necessary, but we witness a psychological destruction by the state. And Wiesler is convinced of the rightness of his cause. He has no real life outside his job; we see his shaby flat with nearly no personal items, the routine visit by a prostitute (who don't officially exist in a socialist state, of course), and the perfectionist way he and his team bug the writer's flat in twenty minutes, no more, no less. When he notices a neighbour of the writers' noticing the team, he tells the woman that unless she keeps her mouth shut, her daughter will lose any chance to study medicine. The fact that he knows not only the neigbour's name but her daughter's, and what place at the university her daughter has applied to are a detail that illustrate the thorougness and ruthlessness of the Stasi in general and this convinced bureaucrat in particular in a frightening manner.
And yet, as with, say, James Stewart's character in Hitchcock's Rear Window, Wiesler and his act of observation serve as a double and metaphor to what the cinema is doing as well. What the audience does. Like him, we become drawn in more and more to the story, and know the way it has to play out. And yet wish to change it. One of the ways in which this film manages to create three dimensional characters and be so moving is to make the actress into more than just the object of desire for everyone. (Including Wiesler.) Of course the party official, a minister/secretary (not sure whether I should use the English or American designation here), doesn't wait until the Stasi has removed his rival; he's a powerful man, after all, and the actress wants to keep working, so he already makes a pass early on, and she has sex with him. The aftermath is the turning point for both the audience and Wiesler in the way they see the actress. Wiesler is petty enough to arrange it that the writer finds out about this. But the argument, the accusations he and we expect don't come. The actress goes straight to the shower after the sex with the minister, and then silently, in embryonic posture, lies on the bed. The writer, who has worked through feeling suckerpunched and stunned, doesn't say anything. He just lies down next to her and holds her, and the tenderness in that silent scene says so much about their feelings for each.
It's after this that Wiesler starts to feel more than professionalism with a touch of voyeurism and sexual desire. He starts to feel compassion, for both of them. "I'm your audience," he tells the actress, professing to be a fan, and he is, and we are, and the act of watching changes. Of course, we are his audience as well. (Great, great performance by Ulrich Mühe.) Now, there is so much that could have gone wrong in the telling of this story. But it doesn't. Wiesler is no Saulus turning to Paulus; what happens to him, what he does and doesn't do because of it never stretches belief too much, and the consequences are realistic, too. And he's not the only one presented with the question of change. There is the actress, who becomes other people for a living, and is too much of a realist not to know what will happen to her if she chooses integrity over obedience, and yet too much longing for self-respect, and too much in love not to try. There is the writer, who starts out believing that a neutral position in a dictatorship is possible. He's pretty much the quintessential idealist, and ridiculed as such by the politician and probably the audience, and the various things happening to him throughout the film change him, too - the thing with the minister is just one of them; a director who directed several of his plays commits suicide after several years of being banned from the stage. What is a director who can't direct, he asks the writer before that, and later on, someone will ask the actress, what is an actress who can't play?
The realities of a dictatorship. The GDR (= German Democractic Republic), we learn, was the country with the second highest suicide rate in Europe in 1977 (the highest being Hungary), and after that they stopped counting; those statistics weren't allowed to exist anymore. And yet despite its closeness to, say, Le Carré in its depiction of the shabbiness of spy life the film ultimately is anything but cynical. Because it is about compassion, and the possibility to feel compassion. In a way, it's the anti-1984. (The crucial scene in 1984 being one where Winston Smith is brought to the point where he wishes his fate on anyone else, anyone at all, including the woman he loves, and where O'Brien tells him that the future of humanity is a boot in the face.) Not just because Wiesler starting to feel empathy and compassion, but because the writer, despite changing as his good life falls apart around him, is ultimately able to maintain it. Cynism, too, can be an easy way out; the characters who take it here, like Wiesler's superior or the VIP, are the ones who lose. (But they, too, aren't caricatures; no East German equivalent of operetta Nazis here.)
It's a film full of literary allusions which you don't have to decode to enjoy it, but which are fun if you can; one of the writers' friends, named Hauser, looks like the young Brecht, the Brecht poem quoted at one point is Erinnerung an die Marie A., one of these rare instances of a love poem being one through denying the permanence of love and yet through the act of denial avowing it; the two scenes from stagings of the writer's play, one in East Germany in the 80s, one in the reunified Germany of the 90s, are both touching (because of the way this scene, staged twice, relates to the story) and funny because they manage to set up and gently parody two typical (and very different) ways of German stage directing so accurately. It's a film where the written word actually does make a difference - both in the sense of literature, and in the sense of the reports Wiesler writes. In the end, it's one of the most humane films I ever saw.
Early on, the politician and the writer have a conversation which is crucial to the film. After congratulating the writer to his newest play, the politician tells him condescendingly they all love the writers' work because it tells the same story over and over again, that people can change. But of course, he adds, people can't. So this is the question for the film - can they? If so, how much? And what are they changing in to?
The Stasi officer, Wiesler (yes, that name associates "weasel" in German, too) is our main character, and the introduction we get to him is chilling, as he breaks a suspect by repeating the same questions to him again and again in a 48-hours interrogation. No physical force is necessary, but we witness a psychological destruction by the state. And Wiesler is convinced of the rightness of his cause. He has no real life outside his job; we see his shaby flat with nearly no personal items, the routine visit by a prostitute (who don't officially exist in a socialist state, of course), and the perfectionist way he and his team bug the writer's flat in twenty minutes, no more, no less. When he notices a neighbour of the writers' noticing the team, he tells the woman that unless she keeps her mouth shut, her daughter will lose any chance to study medicine. The fact that he knows not only the neigbour's name but her daughter's, and what place at the university her daughter has applied to are a detail that illustrate the thorougness and ruthlessness of the Stasi in general and this convinced bureaucrat in particular in a frightening manner.
And yet, as with, say, James Stewart's character in Hitchcock's Rear Window, Wiesler and his act of observation serve as a double and metaphor to what the cinema is doing as well. What the audience does. Like him, we become drawn in more and more to the story, and know the way it has to play out. And yet wish to change it. One of the ways in which this film manages to create three dimensional characters and be so moving is to make the actress into more than just the object of desire for everyone. (Including Wiesler.) Of course the party official, a minister/secretary (not sure whether I should use the English or American designation here), doesn't wait until the Stasi has removed his rival; he's a powerful man, after all, and the actress wants to keep working, so he already makes a pass early on, and she has sex with him. The aftermath is the turning point for both the audience and Wiesler in the way they see the actress. Wiesler is petty enough to arrange it that the writer finds out about this. But the argument, the accusations he and we expect don't come. The actress goes straight to the shower after the sex with the minister, and then silently, in embryonic posture, lies on the bed. The writer, who has worked through feeling suckerpunched and stunned, doesn't say anything. He just lies down next to her and holds her, and the tenderness in that silent scene says so much about their feelings for each.
It's after this that Wiesler starts to feel more than professionalism with a touch of voyeurism and sexual desire. He starts to feel compassion, for both of them. "I'm your audience," he tells the actress, professing to be a fan, and he is, and we are, and the act of watching changes. Of course, we are his audience as well. (Great, great performance by Ulrich Mühe.) Now, there is so much that could have gone wrong in the telling of this story. But it doesn't. Wiesler is no Saulus turning to Paulus; what happens to him, what he does and doesn't do because of it never stretches belief too much, and the consequences are realistic, too. And he's not the only one presented with the question of change. There is the actress, who becomes other people for a living, and is too much of a realist not to know what will happen to her if she chooses integrity over obedience, and yet too much longing for self-respect, and too much in love not to try. There is the writer, who starts out believing that a neutral position in a dictatorship is possible. He's pretty much the quintessential idealist, and ridiculed as such by the politician and probably the audience, and the various things happening to him throughout the film change him, too - the thing with the minister is just one of them; a director who directed several of his plays commits suicide after several years of being banned from the stage. What is a director who can't direct, he asks the writer before that, and later on, someone will ask the actress, what is an actress who can't play?
The realities of a dictatorship. The GDR (= German Democractic Republic), we learn, was the country with the second highest suicide rate in Europe in 1977 (the highest being Hungary), and after that they stopped counting; those statistics weren't allowed to exist anymore. And yet despite its closeness to, say, Le Carré in its depiction of the shabbiness of spy life the film ultimately is anything but cynical. Because it is about compassion, and the possibility to feel compassion. In a way, it's the anti-1984. (The crucial scene in 1984 being one where Winston Smith is brought to the point where he wishes his fate on anyone else, anyone at all, including the woman he loves, and where O'Brien tells him that the future of humanity is a boot in the face.) Not just because Wiesler starting to feel empathy and compassion, but because the writer, despite changing as his good life falls apart around him, is ultimately able to maintain it. Cynism, too, can be an easy way out; the characters who take it here, like Wiesler's superior or the VIP, are the ones who lose. (But they, too, aren't caricatures; no East German equivalent of operetta Nazis here.)
It's a film full of literary allusions which you don't have to decode to enjoy it, but which are fun if you can; one of the writers' friends, named Hauser, looks like the young Brecht, the Brecht poem quoted at one point is Erinnerung an die Marie A., one of these rare instances of a love poem being one through denying the permanence of love and yet through the act of denial avowing it; the two scenes from stagings of the writer's play, one in East Germany in the 80s, one in the reunified Germany of the 90s, are both touching (because of the way this scene, staged twice, relates to the story) and funny because they manage to set up and gently parody two typical (and very different) ways of German stage directing so accurately. It's a film where the written word actually does make a difference - both in the sense of literature, and in the sense of the reports Wiesler writes. In the end, it's one of the most humane films I ever saw.