Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Watching
the Watchers
(The Lives of Others, 4/2/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Don't
look now, but there's a lot of nostalgia around for the straightforward
days of the Cold War. We're not just talking about sentiment on the
dingier side of the old Iron Curtain. Yes, to face an enemy with defined
borders, with a uniformed army, who can be trusted to behave rationally—that,
as the credit card commercial wisely observes, is priceless. Even the
less appealing aspects of living under communism, like state-sponsored
surveillance of citizens, now seems quaint compared to today, when we
tolerate wall-to-wall scrutiny by anybody with a cheap mini-camera.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's
impressive debut, The Lives of Others, invites us to once again
taste that sweeter, simpler vintage of repression. The intelligent script
(written by von Donnersmarck) is set in East Germany in the early 1980's.
Hauptmann Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is a hot-shot interrogator with
the Stasi—the state secret police—whose future seems bright
due to his connections and all-around misoanthropy. A unique opportunity
soon comes his way to undertake 24-hour surveillance of Dreymann (Sebastian
Koch), a thoughtful but patriotic playwright with a reputation for being
"our only non-subversive writer." Such renown naturally invites
its own kind of official mistrust—supplemented in his case by a
certain party official's determination to possess Dreymann's actress
girlfriend (Martina Gedeck).
And so Wiesler is soon installed
in the attic above the writer's apartment, poring over every word uttered
there at every hour of the day. It is the charming—if implausible—conceit
of the script that immersion in Dreymann's troubles at last becomes
a substitute for the life Wiesler has long denied himself. As his colleagues
in the Stasi close in, he finds himself sympathizing with Dreymann and
even, mein Gott, protecting him. In this sense, the film is a
Kafka tale turned on its head, as the hard shell of an oppressive system
is stripped away to reveal the humanity beneath.
Von Donnersmarck's film is reminiscent
of the trilogy of titles made by Istvan Szabo in the 1980's (Mephisto,
Colonel Redl, Hanussen), all of which were set around themes of
art, illusion, and sado-militarism. Like the Szabo films, Lives
captures its subject with a fierce, unsentimental clarity that is, at
its best, highly illuminating. At its worst, it can also be rather schematic,
as if the tale was being blocked out for us by a clever lad using index
cards. Both qualities can explain why it won the Oscar this year for
Best Foreign Language film.
As Wiesler the watcher, Mühe
has the highly apt look of Kevin Spacey's corpse after 48 hours of putrefaction.
What he achieves is impressive, managing with great economy the difficult
transition from charmless organization man to human being. The square-jawed
Koch has something less clear to work with as Dreymann, who is supposed
to seem both sympathetic and serenely content within a rotten system.
Best of all is Gedeck as Dreymann's luckless girlfriend—after looking
right through her for the first hour, I couldn't take my eyes off her
for the second, as she finds herself cast in a role she'll never live
to master. I guess that makes me a watcher too.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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