1 post tagged “lives of others”

Lives of Others

The Lives of Others is a critically-acclaimed, Oscar-winning German film starring several veterans of the big and small screen.  These actors have extensive resumes on imbd.com; however, I just wasn’t feelin’ it in this film, with one exception.

It is 1984 in East Germany, aka the German Democratic Republic.  Of course, there is nothing democratic at all about the GDR; it is a Communist state.  Georg (Sebastian Koch) is a playwright endorsed by the Party; his girlfriend, Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), is an actress who performs in his plays.  A Party big-wig lusts after Christa and decides to get rid of his competition by bugging their apartment and listening for any reason to have Georg arrested.  The man assigned to the surveillance is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a hard-nosed bureaucrat who has always toed the party line.

Wiesler becomes privy to their every move, every secret, and soon finds himself involved in their lives.  It is Wiesler’s transformation from a lifeless, lonely automaton to a man with a heart, a soul and his own will that is truly fascinating.  He has been trained to express no emotion, and this makes his internal changes all the more intriguing; he exhibits very few extrenal cues. Christa and Georg are merely a means to this end.  It is Wiesler’s reactions to their lives that is interesting, not their lives themselves.  And Mühe is the only actor who convinced me; Koch and Gedeck may as well have been in an extra-long episode of Days of Our Lives.  Both just seemed to plod along through the script – time to act surprised, time to act horrified.

Overall the film held my interest, but outside of Wiesler himself there is little worth watching.