KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: 5 out of 5
With 2007 hindsight, a thriller set in East Berlin in 1984 in which the secret police, the Stasi, are the villains, risks being drained of dramatic blood. But the fact that we know what happened in the end adds to the impact of this brilliant film because it casts over the knuckle-whitening drama a pall of sadness. That it ends, against the odds, on a note of hope is the last of its many impressive achievements: the final line in which a character utters, "It's for me", seems to speak for at least two lost generations.
Tautly plotted, wonderfully acted and shot through with the agonising ironies created by mistaken intentions, this is a film with the moral heft of Shakespeare or the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles. The fact that it is the first feature for the writer-director (who won the Best Foreign Film Oscar) inspires an admiration bordering on awe.
The two main characters, who never meet each other but are intimately involved, are Georg Dreyman (Koch), a handsome and successful dramatist who remains on the right side of the authorities, and Stasi officer Gerd Weisler, assigned to spy on him.
The idea, the very essence of totalitarian surveillance, is that innocence, besieged long enough by suspicion, morphs into guilt.
With chilling efficiency, Weisler and his goons bug the apartment Dreyman shares with his partner Christa (Gedeck), pausing on the way out to terrorise a neighbour into silence with a single sentence. Then, gradually, as Weisler eavesdrops on the banal details of a blameless couple's lives, something strange happens, both to his mission and to him.
To detail myriad plot twists that crank the story tighter with every scene would be to rob a meticulously constructed plot of its surprise. Words can't do justice to its vicelike grip and its multilayered texture can't be explained without giving away its secrets. But most of its drama is from scenes involving two people, only one of whom knows what is going on. And its ironies come from the fact that the concealment does not always occur for bad reasons.
The performances are virtually beyond praise: Gedeck, her face smeared with self-loathing, is the film's real tragic figure and watching Muhe's gradual transformation is something of a miracle. Tukur, as an ambitious Stasi thug, is also brilliant.
The whole, however, is more than the sum of its perfectly crafted parts: this is a film about whether people can commit bad acts with good motives, and vice versa. However, while much of it may recall Coppola's masterwork The Conversation, this film's dramatic lineage goes back much further. For once, the overused word masterpiece seems almost inadequate.
The Lives Of Others
Cast: Ulrich Muhe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Running time: 137 mins
Rating: M, sex scenes
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: The best foreign film Oscar-winner is a tautly plotted political thriller of moral heft and fierce intelligence. A masterpiece
