German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s startlingly ambitious debut, The Lives of Others, is somewhat difficult to pin down. Set in communist East Berlin (German is spoken, with subtitles), it chronicles the activities of a few higher-ups in the cultural branch of the Stasi East Germany’s secret police force.
It’s 1984, so the Stasi spy on everyone, even artists. The film focuses mostly on a playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), his actress girlfriend, Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck) and the Stasi captain Gerard Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), who is assigned to eavesdrop, trying to find evidence of subversive activity. But Wiesler’s Stasi comrades, along with Dreyman’s artist friends, remain at the edges of the film, showing up now and then to advance the plot and complicate matters, ultimately turning Lives into a messy (at times incestuous) and compelling movie — part thriller, part drama — about the intersection of politics, life and art.
At the beginning of the film, though, divisions are clear. Wiesler is a devoted communist, whose severe, gray clothing embodies the era’s minimalism as well as the party’s asceticism. He’s committed to the state, but only until he spends countless hours listening to Georg and Christa-Marie (whose apartment he has wiretapped).
Soon, he’s emotionally engaged with them from afar, mostly because he doesn’t have a life of his own. This gains relevance when Georg drifts towards dissidence: Wiesler, having seen the beauty in the life of the artist, and also the ugliness within the Stasi (where, it seems, inter-office politics and enabling the boss’s trysts are more important than communist ideals), decides not to reveal to the higher-ups that Georg is responsible for some leaked state secrets.
Everything gets very complicated, and, for the last act — a race to see who will catch who red handed — it’s unclear where anybody’s loyalties lie (Christa-Marie too has vacillated throughout). Like the rest of the film, the end is well acted and well executed, managing to cast an interesting light on communism in Germany.
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