Stark ideology

by RICHARD JONES

SET in East Berlin in 1984, five years before the Wall came down, The Lives Of Others shows us how the feared Stasi secret police system worked.

A high profile couple, playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), come under suspicion ultimately leading to electronic surveillance.

Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is the officer assigned to the couple's case with particular emphasis on Georg.

He's philosophically aligned to the ideals of the German Democratic Republic. Privately, though, Georg has become infuriated at the way it's devolved into a police state.

Wiesler monitors every aspect of his life, and Christa-Maria's too, but underneath everything the Stasi officer becomes more and more intertwined with the lives he's monitoring from the attic of their building.

In an amazing twist while he's observing the lives of these others, Wiesler becomes protective of his charges.

The Stasi officer is a real idealogue. He's totally committed to the GDR cause so anyone who questions its methods immediately excites his suspicion.

He lives alone in a bleak high-rise apartment. It's not all that dissimilar from the interrogation rooms where he does his dirty work.

Wiesler is extremely efficient at what he does. The irony is that the Stasi captain gradually comes to realise that he and Georg both share a political ideology even if the playwright does not condone the Stalinist way it's enforced.

The Lives Of Others won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, a triumph for first-time filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

For those of us who fondly remember the 2003 comedy Good Bye Lenin! also set in East Berlin, The Lives Of Others gives us a completely different slant on life in the quaintly-named German Democratic Republic.

8 August 2007

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