The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
"The Lives of Others" portrays the only kind of love story that can exist in a police state: Paranoid, one-sided, voyeuristic. A movie of slowly accumulating tension and power, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's drama -- a foreign language Oscar nominee, with a good shot at winning -- is also a romance between two men, but not the way you think.
The fascination here is of the watcher for the watched: of an East German surveillance expert for the worldly playwright under his microscope. "The Lives of Others" has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.
The surveillance wonk is Gerd Weisler (Ulriche Muhe), a captain in the secret police ministry that generations of East Germans knew and feared as the Stasi. He's not a rising star like his friend Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur). Rather, Weisler's the drab spook you never see -- the one who brings you to ruin. He knows the ins and outs of bugs and hidden cameras, and he runs an interrogation like a poker game, looking for the tell and always finding it.
The time is the mid-1980s, and the Soviet bloc is beginning to crack. Grubitz asks Weisler to open a surveillance file on Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch, from "Gloomy Sunday"), a handsome playwright who's friendly to the regime but too intelligent to really be trusted. Weisler attends one of Georg's productions and, lurking with binoculars, spies his quarry's leading lady and lover, Christa (Martina Gedeck). She embodies all the noise and color this invisible man has eliminated from his life. He's hooked; he has to see how the play unfolds.
"The Lives of Others" evolves into an oddly entertaining split-level experience. In his East Berlin apartment, Georg argues and has make-up sex with Christa, meets with dissident friends, and mulls whether to take a stand. His is the drama of the talented but cautious man, and Koch, who suggests a more sensitive Powers Boothe, captures it with sympathy.
In the attic above, sharing shifts with a bored Stasi flunky and typing the least bit of humdrum into his reports, is Weisler, who's addicted like a housewife to her favorite soap. Pulled in by Christa, he's held by Georg, respecting first the man and then his dilemma. Always discreet, he describes the couple's lovemaking in clinical terms, leaving out the passion. Soon he decides to omit other matters as well.
"The Lives of Others" thus wonders if doing nothing can represent as great a commitment as taking action -- if passivity can be political -- and it does so in the context of gripping prison-break suspense. The prison, of course, is daily life in the German Democratic Republic, where no word or deed is innocent and where a collapsible typewriter, smuggled in from the outside world, is more dangerous than a bomb.
Von Donnersmarck has made a film that spurns "ostalgie," the wry nostalgia for East Germany that fueled the light-hearted "Good Bye Lenin!" This is a gray, intolerable gulag of a society, with artists and actors chewing their own limbs like trapped animals.
The paranoia even has levels: Grubitz harangues a young Stasi officer in the ministry cafeteria for telling an anti-Socialist joke, then tells him he's kidding, then implies that maybe he's not. The kid's face turns green with uncertainty, and we see him much later at a dead-end desk job. Even when you're safe here, you're not.
To survive in such an environment you have to cut deals, and "The Lives of Others" is sharp about which deals constitute pragmatism and which constitute betrayal (of principles, loved ones, oneself; the choices are endless). Von Donnersmarck has cast the film well and he keeps things moving -- he favors solid storytelling over inspired filmmaking -- and he trusts that all will be held in place by the bald head and melting eyes of Weisler, the vulture who has developed a conscience.
If "The Lives of Others" has a flaw, it's that maybe vultures don't have consciences. In a performance of small, precise movements, Muhe creates a good soldier whose conversion doesn't quite ring true. Why, after a life of fealty to the Socialist state, does this unemotional cog start feeling? There's a hole in the movie's internal logic, but it's one most audiences and Academy members will be happy to overlook.
The coda, after the blood and the bricks have been cleaned up, is as satisfying as anything in an old Hollywood romance. At the end of those movies, the ugly ducking blooms, the unwed mother is recognized by her grown child, the secret lover is revealed. "The Lives of Others" offers something both more banal and more profound: A police state's unblinking eye finally seen, and with it the shabby, complicated little man at the other end of the camera.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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