Das Leben der Anderen

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck  (2006)

The Lives of Others isn’t a great film but it has great things in it:  an historically important subject, a finely written central character realised by an outstanding actor, and the best ending – with the most perfect closing line – of any movie of the first decade of this century.   This was the writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s first feature – he was only thirty-two when the film was released – and it’s an amazingly mature piece of work.  (It’s a mystery to me that he’s made only one movie since – The Tourist in 2010.)  The protagonist is the Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler, who comes to obey the dictates of his conscience rather than the orders of his superiors in the East German secret police.  Wiesler is played by Ulrich Mühe, who spent most of his life in East Germany and was politically and publicly active in speaking out against the Communist regime there.  Mühe died, aged only fifty-four, soon after The Lives of Others was released (at least he survived long enough to see its international success).  The film, in retrospect, represents a summation of both his personal experience and his professional career.  Mühe gives the performance of a lifetime in more ways than one.

What’s not so great in The Lives of Others is the writing, acting and direction of those parts of the story which don’t directly involve Wiesler.   The film is a true political thriller, with plenty of suspenseful moments, but the drama of the relationship between the successful playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and the actress Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck) plays out unsurprisingly, and Sieland’s actressy quality too often feels less an expression of the character than of Martina Gedeck.  There’s a lot of Gabriel Yared’s music and the subplot centred on the ‘Sonata for a Good Man’, although it’s crucial to the start of Wiesler’s change of heart, contains the film’s most conventional moment.  Dreyman is given the sheet music for the piano sonata by a black-listed theatre director, Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), who shortly afterwards hangs himself.  Perhaps Jerska did give Dreyman the sheet music simply in order for his grief- and conscience-stricken friend to play it on receiving the news of Jerska’s suicide – but this comes over as a bit of plotting that’s merely convenient to Donnersmarck.  The power relationships within the Stasi hierarchy are pretty obvious, although Ulrich Tukur is excellent as Wiesler’s superior Grubitz:  he makes this dislikeable but shrewd man a human being rather than merely a representative of the system.  There’s a good scene in which a young man tells a joke about Erich Honecker (and it’s a good joke) and pays the price.  The young man’s reappearance towards the end of the film is in the nature of a joke too.  After the authorities realise that he obstructed their investigation into Dreyman, Wiesler is demoted to a minor clerical job in the bowels of a government building.  He spends his days there steaming open letters and we see him at work – just as a co-worker tells him that the Berlin Wall has fallen.  This co-worker is the indiscreet joker.  There’s a streak of superficially effective symbolism running through The Lives of Others:  the affair between the repulsive government minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme) and the drug-dependent Sieland – artists being screwed by the East German establishment – is central to the story.

Wiesler and Mühe are something else.  I remember hearing, at the margins of a committee meeting at work, a German history professor telling other committee members that The Lives of Others was a fiction, that there was no record of any reasonably senior Stasi officer doing what Wiesler did.  Ulrich Mühe creates a truth that transcends historical fact; and the symbolic aspect of Donnersmarck’s script is much richer in his writing of Wiesler.  A life that’s reduced to spying on others, as Gerd Wiesler’s is, epitomises the GDR modus vivendi more generally yet his psychology is made fully individual.  It’s Wiesler’s solitariness and the fact that he’s drawn to the relationship between Dreyman and Sieland – a relationship between two artists – that makes his conversion so fascinating.   (At one point, Wiesler steals a Brecht text from Dreyman’s apartment.)   Ulrich Mühe discloses Wiesler’s thoughts and feelings to the audience in a way that convinces us no one on screen will perceive what we perceive.  Wiesler knows how to keep a secret:  invading privacy is his bread and butter.   In the closing stages, we see – and Dreyman watches – Wiesler walking along the street with his trolley of mail to deliver.   Ulrich Mühe’s walk is a perfect example of how a great actor can embody and, at the same time, illuminate anonymity.   Mühe is reminiscent of Gene Hackman in this respect and Wiesler’s line of work and bleak existence naturally bring to mind Hackman’s Harry Caul in The Conversation.   The difference, of course, is that Wiesler becomes an unsung hero:  the happy – triumphant – ending of The Lives of Others has such an impact – I feel a thrill and the prick of tears just thinking about it now.  It’s right that Dreyman doesn’t speak to Wiesler at the end.  But we have the privilege of witnessing what happens when Wiesler goes into a store to buy Dreyman’s new book.

29 April 2012