Get A Lives

Remember how I raved about the movie Pan’s Labyrinth a few months back? That movie was clearly a favorite to win Best Foreign Film in the 2006 Academy Awards. Yesterday I watched the movie that beat it in that category, and I realized why it won.

The Lives of Others is a movie aptly set in 1984 East Germany, several years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Back then the communist regime deployed the Stasi, their secret police, to monitor their citizens. The movie focuses on one Stasi agent, Wiesler (played with pitch-perfect stoicism by the late Ulrich Mühe) who is tasked to spy on a playwright, Georg Dreyman, and his lover Christa-Maria Sieland, a prominent stage actress.

In the making of documentary, writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck described what inspired his feature film debut. He recalled an anecdote about Lenin who said that while Beethoven’s “Appassionata” was an astounding miracle of art, he couldn’t bear to listen to it anymore because it made him want to pat people’s heads instead of bashing them mercilessly. Donnersmarck suddenly had this image of a man with headphones spying on his enemies but what he is hearing instead is beautiful music that touches and transforms him.

Pan’s Labyrinth works on several levels, shifting from the real to the fantastical. But I think the more difficult tightrope act was done in The Lives of Others. That director Donnersmarck manages to pull it off with maximum restraint and a discipline worthy of the Stasi is even more remarkable.

The twisty tale that unravels should be savored fully, so I won’t take away from you guys the joy of discovering a complex, multi-layered movie that’s as much a meditation on art and humanity as it is a gripping suspense thriller. Instead, I admonish you: watch this and I’ll pat you in the head; fail to watch and I’ll smash your head in.