The Lives of Others review

Based on a recommendation of a friend of mine, I went to see The Lives of Others at one of the local art theaters. It was every bit as good as she'd led me to believe.

It's set in East Germany, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the Stasi, the German secret police, kept taps on everyone of interest and made sure that anyone who got too interesting became markedly less so. The main character is a Stasi agent who begins monitoring a prominent author. That author is above reproach, believing in socialism and East Germany, and writing his plays in support of that system. The Stasi agent is suspicious of him for that very reason. One of his superiors decides to indulge the agent's suspicions, in order to curry favor with his superior, who covets the author's actress girlfriend. Clear so far? Hang on... there are potential spoilers in the next paragraph, so you may want to skip to the following one.

As the agent's spying on the author progresses, he comes to admire him, then to cover for him, and finally to extricate him from a major sting. The author's blacklisted friend had committed suicide, leading to the author's publishing a piece in Der Spiegel - a very risky undertaking, even under a pseudonym.

This movie is fabulously suspenseful. The abuse of near-total power by the Stasi elite, shown in contrast with the idealism of its agent, is striking. The lies that the artists and authors tell one another and themselves, trying to stay in the good graces of the authorities while still producing something worthwhile, is similarly intriguing.

The movie is in German with subtitles. I managed to catch quite a bit of the German, which is a bit surprising, since I haven't studied it in twenty years or so. I went with a friend of mine who didn't quite catch all the intrigue; I'm not sure I caught it all myself. I highly recommend catching this movie. It ran about two and a half hours, but it really flies by, even without any Hollywood-style action.