First of all I have to say, only an academy who gives the best picture to How Green was my Valley in the presence of Citizen Kane and considers Rocky better Taxi Driver and two decades later, sacrifices United 93 in the foot of The Departed, just to redeem that ridiculous mistake, could possibly conclude The lives of others realistically has any chance of being better than Pan’s Labyrinth in any possible way! And I would never have forgiven them if they hadn’t given 3 awards to this breath-taking masterpiece and also for being brave enough to choose Annie Hall over Star Wars, years ago. Anyway, as much as it is a critic for Oscar’s selection procedure, it is not for this great movie, since in fact, every single movie of 2006 was inferior to Pan’s labyrinth!
The Lives of others or Das Leben der Anderen, by Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, is a beautifully depicted tale about living in a police-state dictatorship in East-Germany, GDR, ironically (but I absolutely don’t think accidentally) in the year 1984!
The story follows the gentle metamorphosis of a Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler from a cold-hearted agent to a wonderful human being, while being assigned to monitor a loyal yet suspicious famous playwright Georg Dreymann and his elegant, charming girlfriend who is also a well-known actress.
The movie is honest, subtle and noticeably realistic. There is absolutely no intention to demonize anybody or make a political statement, whatsoever. Instead, it more deals with exposing the realities of living under an ideologist, controlling, totalitarian regime and its relentless yet pathetic efforts to tame people’s hearts and minds while people (including even party officials and secret service agents) on the other side of the isle, are struggling in such an environment to create the delicate, elaborate and sometimes, seemingly impossible balance between their natural, personal interests and their rapidly diminishing consciences.
And where I’m sure the Canadian audiences as well as their American counterparts could only sympathize with the characters in the movie from far far away, I, alongside with everybody who has a first-hand experience of such condition, lived every moment of this film while dealing with a weird, nauseating sense of nostalgia, almost like being masochistically satisfied of having a sip of that experience, in the first place while dramatically rejoiced that it’s all over!
Near the end of the movie, when the former minister Hempf, grimly reminds Georg (who has stopped writing since the unification) the intellectual stimulation for artistic creativities that the little republic’s dictatorship and censorship was providing for them and grins at the fact that in this new world, they have nothing to believe in and nothing to rebel against hence nothing to write about, Georg’s silence, silently approves the remarks but soon he finds something well worth writing about. A sonata for a good man!
