Friday, March 23, 2007

On "The Lives of Others"

Michael Wood has an excellent piece in the London Review of Books on the superb and wrenching German film "The Lives of Others," the surprise winner last month of the Oscar for best foreign film, over "Pan's Labyrinth." For local readers, the movie is still playing in Boston, theaters and showtimes here.

The film takes place in Berlin in the years just before the Wall came down in 1989, with an epilogue that comes after. There are in a sense two main characters, one a playwright/writer who begins as a model citizen in the eyes of the state but becomes a dissident, the other the man who spies on him for the Stasi. The interplay between them, though they never meet, is intimate, and morally complex. As is, crucially, the relationship between the writer and his wife, a prominent actress.

Wood deftly captures the mood and force of "The Lives of Others," and closes with a paragraph that deserves to be quoted in full. However, I must say that there are spoilers ahead. Stop reading now if, like George Costanza, you "like to go in fresh."

There are two ways of reading the story of the good person [the spy, Gerd Wiesler]. One is rather sentimental, and the film leans into it towards the end: it's the story of the prodigal monster, the tormentor who discovers a little humanity in himself after all, and over whom in heaven there is more rejoicing than over the thousands of people who were not monsters to start with. In this version Wiesler is a hero, and the attraction of the [Ulrich] Muhe's low-key presentation of the character contributes to this effect. The other reading provides no hero, and scarcely even a good person except in the bleakest, most diminished of perspectives. But it is, I think, more compelling than the first reading, and it is what the actual title of the film picks up. Wiesler does not find virtue or moral salvation; he finds, through the sheer patience and persistence of his spying, through the long, narrow act of abnegation that is his life, a form of humanity he can approach only vicariously, a world where the pleasures of 'being friendly', in Brecht's phrase, do still exist against all the odds, and are not a mere mask or lure for corruption.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:44 PM

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