The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others (2006) is about a Stasi officer assigned to listen to a writer in East Berlin in 1984. Wiesler teaches interrogation technique and follows the rules exactly. He has a playwright's flat wired and takes up position in the attic with headphones. The real reason for the operation is not state security: a minister wants the writer's partner and is looking for a pretext to remove him. Wiesler changes as he listens. He starts reading, listening to music, writing things into his reports that did not happen. All of the tension comes from that quiet sabotage; he never makes a speech, he simply leaves certain lines out. Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, was a theatre actor in East Germany, and when the files were opened he learned his own life had been under surveillance: four people in his theatre company had been placed there to report on him, and the flat he lived in had been an observation post. Mühe also said his wife at the time, Jenny Grollmann, was registered as an informer. She denied it and took legal action; later assessments argued she had been coerced and that much of what the Stasi recorded came from the service itself. It was never settled. So the face carrying the film belongs to a man who lived its subject at first hand. It won the foreign language film Oscar. The last scene closes the whole film in one sentence. It runs 137 minutes. Good for: political drama, the Cold War, and character cinema. Less good for: the pace is slow, the register is heavy throughout, and there is a suicide.