The Lives of Others (***3/4)

? When it came to intruding on the lives of ordinary citizens, the KGB had nothing on East Germany’s Stasi. Its 300,000 agents monitored a population numbering just 20 million. Germany’s upset victor for this year’s foreign-language Oscar follows a playwright who, with his actress girlfriend, becomes the subject of Stasi surveillance. At the same time, we follow the agent, a loyal socialist whose job it becomes to listen in on and interpret their conversations.
+ Information was the currency of the Stasi, and writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck depicts the state’s use of both electronic methods and human intelligence-gathering methods to acquire it. Von Donnersmarck’s heavily researched script shows the fears that the system relied on and the human feelings, ambition, jealousy, loneliness, and so forth, that a canopy of legalistic structures and misguided ideology could not obliterate. The story tends somewhat to the inevitable, but then doesn’t end there, and it’s the last act that sets the rest in relief. Even the color and light of the post-communism period is shocking compared to the drabness of most of the movie. (Both the look and even the sound of the bygone era are strikingly revived.)
- The story spends as much or more time with the playwright and his girlfriend as with the Stasi agent. I might have tilted the balance toward the character who makes the greatest transformation, one perhaps inadequately explained by the events in the film.
= ***1/2 If you’ve wondered what it was like to live in a static totalitarian regime where the personal and the political are inseparable, this re-creates a still-recent era with docudrama reality. (For another such perspective, check out the biographical Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, set in the Nazi era.)

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reviewed 3/9/07