Largely about The Lives of Others...
Apr. 30th, 2007 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieI have to say, I’ve got some respect for Prince Harry after reading that he wants (and will) serve with a combat unit in Iraq. He clearly doesn’t have to do so, so at least he's got some guts.
Changing tack, I keep being haunted by The Lives of Others. It is an amazing film and I’ll try to see it again before it leaves theaters, if I can.
I think the title is enormously appropriate. Of the two fulcrum characters of the movie: the playwright Dreyman and the Stasi officer Wiesler, only one of them has a life. Dreyman is portrayed as someone who lives life to the fullest: joys and sorrows and small things like playing an improvised football match with the neighborhood kids on the way home. He is someone who is incredibly, gloriously alive actually. Wiesler is hollow, and the lives of others, the lives he listens to, watches, are the only lives he has.
I keep thinking of the contrast between the two men’s apartments, Dreyman’s incredibly lived in, a mess of books everywhere, notes, photograph of Christa, things. Lots of things. Not necessarily material chic or anything as he is hardly rolling in luxury, but it’s a very lived-in place. You can read a lot of his personality in the place. And Wiesler’s, so sterile it could be a hotel, with food he gets out of a tube, no books, and his entertainment a TV program about farming. Dreyman and Christa love each other and they make love while Wiesler’s closest attempt at intimacy involves a visit from a businessslike hooker. Just as Dreyman is always surrounded by people: friends, admirers, his girlfriend, etc etc. Weisler is perched alone. In fact even when he is with other people, there is a wall around him, an isolation.
I think that joy in life is what targets Dreyman, even more so than the fact that the big party boss wants his girlfriend. In a rigid, joyless, totalitarian regime, when you see someone so unabashedly enjoying life, you cannot help but get suspicious because you know that this world is not so joyful, so something must be wrong.
This movie is very different from The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the movie about the events in Ireland in the 1920s, but it has one thing in common. It shows how totalitarian regimes (be they the English occupying Ireland in the 20s or the Communist dictatorship) radicalizes people. The regime creates its own opposition. Dreyman starts the movie someone who genuinely believes in Communism. So does Wiesler, actually. If the system worked the way it was supposed to, I doubt Dreyman would ever chose to write the piece in Der Spiegel.
It is the complete emptiness of Wiesler’s own life that makes him so open to actually drinking in the ‘lives of others,’ in this case Dreyman and Christa. And whatever spark of soul he has actually ends up reviving under that. He falls in love with them, a little (not in a sexual sense). And that is what leads him to switch from a passive observer to a more and more active participant. I love the scene where he steals Dreyman’s Brecht and he is reading it in his bare apartment and you almost visibly see something dry in him begin to melt (yes, I am mixing my metaphors). It’s the very fact that Dreyman and Christa do not know they are being observed that makes it so impactful for Wiesler. They are not putting on an act, this is how they are. And he progresses from that to actually trying to interfere obliquely when Christa leaves Dreyman to go for her scheduled weekly meeting with the Party Boss (who is obsessed with her and she has sex with him so he will allow her to continue to act), after Dreyman who found out the truth begs her not to go. He lets the supposed car with an escapee go, he doctors his reports. And of course it proceeds further and further until he is the one who takes and hides the tell-talle typewriter on which Dreyman wrote his article that would land him in jail.
I think what the movie shows is that you cannot survive the system untainted. You are forced to become a rebel or a collaborator. Life in an arbitrary, corrupt regime is a series of compromises or a push to rebellion. Part of the cataclyst for Wiesler’s change is the discovery that the reason Dreyman’s entire house is bugged, that the Stasi is looking for things on him, is not because of any suspicious activity on his part, but because a party higher up covets Christa and thinks if Dreyman is out of her life, he’ll have her for good as opposed to once a week compromise.
Dreyman is a hero, in his quiet intellectual way, and Wiesler becomes one by actively chosing to protect him, but the movie does not condemn those who are not able to rise to heroism, who just want to live, to get by. The movie opens with an interrogation of a nameless, professorly looking type, who after being grilled for hours finally gives up the name of a man who helped a neighbor escape to the West. You feel nothing for him but pity, and maybe anger at the regime that makes all but the strongest give in, and the rest turned into martyrs.
This is where Christa comes in. The movie pivots on three characters: Dreyman, Wiesler and Christa, and of the three, Christa is the most ‘average’ one. She is a famous actress, a great one. But her insecurity in her self-worth, the strain of being an actress in a totalitarian regime which can take it all away from her in an instant if she does not do the right thing (she has the example of a director friend who is not able to work for over seven years in front of her), is telling on her. She takes unspecified medication, and it is an attempt to deaden the pain. The pain of all the uncertainty, of the compromises: of the fact that she has to say the right things, that she has to sleep with the Party Boss (there is a brief sex scene in the car between them, and it is ugly, ugly, ugly) etc etc.
She wants to have courage, she wants to be brave, but she cannot withstand the pressure. She is a good person who loves Dreyman and is willing to take a degree of risk for the sake of what is right or good: she leaves for her meeting with the party boss but comes back instead and says she’ll never leave (due in part to Wiesler playing fate). She is interrogated by Wiesler’s boss about the article but does not tell them about the typewriter’s hiding place. But ultimately, she is not cut out to be a hero. When threatened by Wiesler with a total negation of self (or at least self that matters: her ability to act), she gives in. The scene where Wiesler gets her to betray Dreymann, and all without breaking her fingers or what not, is chilling as it is so Orwellian. And that is the thing, she is not a horrible person, she is just not cut out for martyrdom. But she is not cut out for betrayal, either. She cannot live with herself as a result of this, as a result of betraying the man she loves. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie for me is when Dreyman and Christa look at each other as his apartment is being ransacked. It’s all noise around them but you drown in the quiet, because all there seems to be are the silent looks. The utter betrayal in his eyes and the unbearable guilt in hers. Her running out to kill herself (and succeeding) is inevitable and brutal and sad. Of course, by that point Wiesler has removed the incriminating typewriter but how fitting. The investigation is over because the reason for it is over. The woman the party boss wanted is dead. There is no point.
But the movie does not condemn Christa and makes clear everyone has a breaking point. There is a chilling scene where Wiesler’s superior discusses a study done on five types of ‘artistic’ prisoners and how to treat them. He discusses the proper treatment of someone like Dreyman, an extravert who needs people. It’s effective and scary and the satisfaction in the superior’s voice as he says that after such treatment, none of these artists ever write/paint/etc ever again is…Negation of something so basic in one is a kind of murder (that is why the director who couldn’t direct killed himself, why Christa betrayed Dreyman, as what she was threatened with was a kind of death etc) and that is why Wiesler cannot turn Dreyman in. Wiesler has no beauty in his life and he does not want to destroy something beautiful when he sees it.
In so many ways, the movie is about Wiesler acquiring a soul. I love the scene where through his spying headphones he hears Dreyman play a melody ‘Sonata for a Good Man’ as a memorial piece for the friend who killed himself and tears flow silently down his face. He is beginning to feel and it is painful to be unfrozen.
I was also taken with the mundane portrayal of surveilance. It’s both funny and disgusting and sad. In fact, every funny moment is a kind of uncomfortable laughter, you laugh because otherwise you’d squirm in your seat. Observation is total: a student says that keeping someone away for 40 hours in interrogation is inhumane and Wiesler makes a little notation next to his name. And just as total is invasion of privacy. Utter strangers are privy to your most hidden, personal truths. The emotional reunion of Dreyman and Christa (when she returns deciding not to go to the party boss), so overflowing with love and hope and relief, becomes a bunch of dry lines noted by a Stasi flunky line for line followed by a notation that then they have ****. Funny. And disgusting.
This movie closes on a series of epilogues, but I cannot call them that as they are all necessary. To end the movie still in 1984, with Dreyman holding dead Christa in his arms and weeping ‘Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me’ would be a suitably bleak ending, but the moments in 1989, 1991 and 1993 are not codas, they feel integral, incredibly necessary. They lead to an ending that is (to use an oldfashioned, odd term) full of grace. For Dreyman. And for Wiesler. “It’s for me” might just be one of the best closing lines for a movie ever, meaningless out of context, enormous with it.
I only rarely find reviews that really express what I feel, but I found one here. It’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Secret police spy on happy couple in brilliant thriller
Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Friday, February 16, 2007
Before it reveals itself as a profound document, before it even hints at its many degrees of thought and feeling, "The Lives of Others" is already up and running as a tense political thriller. Set in the communist East Germany of just over 20 years ago, it follows the Stasi -- the notorious espionage agency -- as it implements wall-to-wall surveillance on a successful playwright and his actress girlfriend. That angle is in itself unusual: a thriller that follows the villains.
Who are these people who populate the spy agency? They're the vindictive and small-minded, the unimaginative and empty, the cruel and the dull -- and every country has them. But only in tyrannies do they ever get to run things. These are people who see any sign of life as a rebuke of their own deadness. They see happiness as a pretense, because they can't imagine it. They see it as a threat, too, because it implies a contented inner life, some irreducible essence that can't be smudged by their foul hands.
That's why when Stasi Capt. Wiesler first sets eyes on playwright Georg Dreyman, he doesn't like him. Dreyman, by all accounts, is a loyal socialist, but the gaunt, unsmiling captain sees the playwright -- handsome and self-possessed, at home with himself as he watches his latest play -- and pronounces him "arrogant." Dreyman is a happy man -- an artist in love with his work and with another artist, a great actress (Martina Gedeck) -- and that in itself makes him an enemy of the state. The rest is just a matter of details.
At its core, "The Lives of Others" is about the different ways people live. It shows right ways and wrong ways and then, most compellingly, it puts a man who has lived his life in a desperately wrong way -- as a tormenter of innocents, as a government thug -- in the position of listening to the conversations and day-to-day interactions of a thoroughly decent man. This collision is compelling, and it lifts an already suspenseful and fascinating story about life in East Germany onto a metaphysical, universal plane. The result is a great film, the best I've seen since Terrence Malick's "The New World," and far and away the richest and most brilliantly acted picture to be released this Oscar season. It's nominated for best foreign film.
There are three great performances in "The Lives of Others," each very different. As Dreyman, Sebastian Koch has the challenge of presenting a man of innate humanity, someone whose inner quality is apparent in his essential being, despite a surface breeziness that could easily be seen as blithe. Koch seems to achieve the desired effect by having Dreyman lavish selfless attention on everyone with whom he comes into contact. It's in those interactions that we read the acute and sensitive understanding of a poet and a hero.
For Ulrich Mühe, as the captain, the challenge is quite different. His surface note is repressed anger. Underneath that is resentment and fear. That means that anything meaningful that reaches him has to blast through layers of rock, cemented by the mortar of ego. He is almost gone, almost buried within himself, but only almost. The facade is repugnant and never really changes, but every so often there's a glint of something or someone underneath.
At the center of these extremes, there's Gedeck as Christa, who has the misfortune of not being morally extraordinary. Recognized as the premier actress of the East German stage, she is otherwise a normal person, perhaps more sensitive and therefore a little weaker than most -- and therefore no match for the intrigues surrounding her. In any other country, her life would be one of ease and glory. Instead, she finds herself systematically trying to deaden herself to the terror and degradation that waits around every corner.
As for the story, it can wait until you see it. Better to talk about moments and meanings: an ugly sexual interlude that says everything you need to know about the captain's lonely private life. Or the scene in which Dreyman plays a requiem in memory of a friend -- a private moment of reflection and pain that the captain hears, seemingly unmoved, over his headphones. (The captain thinks that life is empty because he's empty, but how does he stay unmoved when confronted, day after day, with evidence to the contrary?) And then there's Gedeck's face, at any point in the film, full of feeling and full of the effort not to feel. It's haunting.
The action takes place in 1984, just five years before the collapse of communism but an eternity away. "The Lives of Others" reminds us that, for millions of people, that happy ending came too late.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/16/DDG9IO4PID1.DTL
Changing tack, I keep being haunted by The Lives of Others. It is an amazing film and I’ll try to see it again before it leaves theaters, if I can.
I think the title is enormously appropriate. Of the two fulcrum characters of the movie: the playwright Dreyman and the Stasi officer Wiesler, only one of them has a life. Dreyman is portrayed as someone who lives life to the fullest: joys and sorrows and small things like playing an improvised football match with the neighborhood kids on the way home. He is someone who is incredibly, gloriously alive actually. Wiesler is hollow, and the lives of others, the lives he listens to, watches, are the only lives he has.
I keep thinking of the contrast between the two men’s apartments, Dreyman’s incredibly lived in, a mess of books everywhere, notes, photograph of Christa, things. Lots of things. Not necessarily material chic or anything as he is hardly rolling in luxury, but it’s a very lived-in place. You can read a lot of his personality in the place. And Wiesler’s, so sterile it could be a hotel, with food he gets out of a tube, no books, and his entertainment a TV program about farming. Dreyman and Christa love each other and they make love while Wiesler’s closest attempt at intimacy involves a visit from a businessslike hooker. Just as Dreyman is always surrounded by people: friends, admirers, his girlfriend, etc etc. Weisler is perched alone. In fact even when he is with other people, there is a wall around him, an isolation.
I think that joy in life is what targets Dreyman, even more so than the fact that the big party boss wants his girlfriend. In a rigid, joyless, totalitarian regime, when you see someone so unabashedly enjoying life, you cannot help but get suspicious because you know that this world is not so joyful, so something must be wrong.
This movie is very different from The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the movie about the events in Ireland in the 1920s, but it has one thing in common. It shows how totalitarian regimes (be they the English occupying Ireland in the 20s or the Communist dictatorship) radicalizes people. The regime creates its own opposition. Dreyman starts the movie someone who genuinely believes in Communism. So does Wiesler, actually. If the system worked the way it was supposed to, I doubt Dreyman would ever chose to write the piece in Der Spiegel.
It is the complete emptiness of Wiesler’s own life that makes him so open to actually drinking in the ‘lives of others,’ in this case Dreyman and Christa. And whatever spark of soul he has actually ends up reviving under that. He falls in love with them, a little (not in a sexual sense). And that is what leads him to switch from a passive observer to a more and more active participant. I love the scene where he steals Dreyman’s Brecht and he is reading it in his bare apartment and you almost visibly see something dry in him begin to melt (yes, I am mixing my metaphors). It’s the very fact that Dreyman and Christa do not know they are being observed that makes it so impactful for Wiesler. They are not putting on an act, this is how they are. And he progresses from that to actually trying to interfere obliquely when Christa leaves Dreyman to go for her scheduled weekly meeting with the Party Boss (who is obsessed with her and she has sex with him so he will allow her to continue to act), after Dreyman who found out the truth begs her not to go. He lets the supposed car with an escapee go, he doctors his reports. And of course it proceeds further and further until he is the one who takes and hides the tell-talle typewriter on which Dreyman wrote his article that would land him in jail.
I think what the movie shows is that you cannot survive the system untainted. You are forced to become a rebel or a collaborator. Life in an arbitrary, corrupt regime is a series of compromises or a push to rebellion. Part of the cataclyst for Wiesler’s change is the discovery that the reason Dreyman’s entire house is bugged, that the Stasi is looking for things on him, is not because of any suspicious activity on his part, but because a party higher up covets Christa and thinks if Dreyman is out of her life, he’ll have her for good as opposed to once a week compromise.
Dreyman is a hero, in his quiet intellectual way, and Wiesler becomes one by actively chosing to protect him, but the movie does not condemn those who are not able to rise to heroism, who just want to live, to get by. The movie opens with an interrogation of a nameless, professorly looking type, who after being grilled for hours finally gives up the name of a man who helped a neighbor escape to the West. You feel nothing for him but pity, and maybe anger at the regime that makes all but the strongest give in, and the rest turned into martyrs.
This is where Christa comes in. The movie pivots on three characters: Dreyman, Wiesler and Christa, and of the three, Christa is the most ‘average’ one. She is a famous actress, a great one. But her insecurity in her self-worth, the strain of being an actress in a totalitarian regime which can take it all away from her in an instant if she does not do the right thing (she has the example of a director friend who is not able to work for over seven years in front of her), is telling on her. She takes unspecified medication, and it is an attempt to deaden the pain. The pain of all the uncertainty, of the compromises: of the fact that she has to say the right things, that she has to sleep with the Party Boss (there is a brief sex scene in the car between them, and it is ugly, ugly, ugly) etc etc.
She wants to have courage, she wants to be brave, but she cannot withstand the pressure. She is a good person who loves Dreyman and is willing to take a degree of risk for the sake of what is right or good: she leaves for her meeting with the party boss but comes back instead and says she’ll never leave (due in part to Wiesler playing fate). She is interrogated by Wiesler’s boss about the article but does not tell them about the typewriter’s hiding place. But ultimately, she is not cut out to be a hero. When threatened by Wiesler with a total negation of self (or at least self that matters: her ability to act), she gives in. The scene where Wiesler gets her to betray Dreymann, and all without breaking her fingers or what not, is chilling as it is so Orwellian. And that is the thing, she is not a horrible person, she is just not cut out for martyrdom. But she is not cut out for betrayal, either. She cannot live with herself as a result of this, as a result of betraying the man she loves. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie for me is when Dreyman and Christa look at each other as his apartment is being ransacked. It’s all noise around them but you drown in the quiet, because all there seems to be are the silent looks. The utter betrayal in his eyes and the unbearable guilt in hers. Her running out to kill herself (and succeeding) is inevitable and brutal and sad. Of course, by that point Wiesler has removed the incriminating typewriter but how fitting. The investigation is over because the reason for it is over. The woman the party boss wanted is dead. There is no point.
But the movie does not condemn Christa and makes clear everyone has a breaking point. There is a chilling scene where Wiesler’s superior discusses a study done on five types of ‘artistic’ prisoners and how to treat them. He discusses the proper treatment of someone like Dreyman, an extravert who needs people. It’s effective and scary and the satisfaction in the superior’s voice as he says that after such treatment, none of these artists ever write/paint/etc ever again is…Negation of something so basic in one is a kind of murder (that is why the director who couldn’t direct killed himself, why Christa betrayed Dreyman, as what she was threatened with was a kind of death etc) and that is why Wiesler cannot turn Dreyman in. Wiesler has no beauty in his life and he does not want to destroy something beautiful when he sees it.
In so many ways, the movie is about Wiesler acquiring a soul. I love the scene where through his spying headphones he hears Dreyman play a melody ‘Sonata for a Good Man’ as a memorial piece for the friend who killed himself and tears flow silently down his face. He is beginning to feel and it is painful to be unfrozen.
I was also taken with the mundane portrayal of surveilance. It’s both funny and disgusting and sad. In fact, every funny moment is a kind of uncomfortable laughter, you laugh because otherwise you’d squirm in your seat. Observation is total: a student says that keeping someone away for 40 hours in interrogation is inhumane and Wiesler makes a little notation next to his name. And just as total is invasion of privacy. Utter strangers are privy to your most hidden, personal truths. The emotional reunion of Dreyman and Christa (when she returns deciding not to go to the party boss), so overflowing with love and hope and relief, becomes a bunch of dry lines noted by a Stasi flunky line for line followed by a notation that then they have ****. Funny. And disgusting.
This movie closes on a series of epilogues, but I cannot call them that as they are all necessary. To end the movie still in 1984, with Dreyman holding dead Christa in his arms and weeping ‘Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me’ would be a suitably bleak ending, but the moments in 1989, 1991 and 1993 are not codas, they feel integral, incredibly necessary. They lead to an ending that is (to use an oldfashioned, odd term) full of grace. For Dreyman. And for Wiesler. “It’s for me” might just be one of the best closing lines for a movie ever, meaningless out of context, enormous with it.
I only rarely find reviews that really express what I feel, but I found one here. It’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Secret police spy on happy couple in brilliant thriller
Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Friday, February 16, 2007
Before it reveals itself as a profound document, before it even hints at its many degrees of thought and feeling, "The Lives of Others" is already up and running as a tense political thriller. Set in the communist East Germany of just over 20 years ago, it follows the Stasi -- the notorious espionage agency -- as it implements wall-to-wall surveillance on a successful playwright and his actress girlfriend. That angle is in itself unusual: a thriller that follows the villains.
Who are these people who populate the spy agency? They're the vindictive and small-minded, the unimaginative and empty, the cruel and the dull -- and every country has them. But only in tyrannies do they ever get to run things. These are people who see any sign of life as a rebuke of their own deadness. They see happiness as a pretense, because they can't imagine it. They see it as a threat, too, because it implies a contented inner life, some irreducible essence that can't be smudged by their foul hands.
That's why when Stasi Capt. Wiesler first sets eyes on playwright Georg Dreyman, he doesn't like him. Dreyman, by all accounts, is a loyal socialist, but the gaunt, unsmiling captain sees the playwright -- handsome and self-possessed, at home with himself as he watches his latest play -- and pronounces him "arrogant." Dreyman is a happy man -- an artist in love with his work and with another artist, a great actress (Martina Gedeck) -- and that in itself makes him an enemy of the state. The rest is just a matter of details.
At its core, "The Lives of Others" is about the different ways people live. It shows right ways and wrong ways and then, most compellingly, it puts a man who has lived his life in a desperately wrong way -- as a tormenter of innocents, as a government thug -- in the position of listening to the conversations and day-to-day interactions of a thoroughly decent man. This collision is compelling, and it lifts an already suspenseful and fascinating story about life in East Germany onto a metaphysical, universal plane. The result is a great film, the best I've seen since Terrence Malick's "The New World," and far and away the richest and most brilliantly acted picture to be released this Oscar season. It's nominated for best foreign film.
There are three great performances in "The Lives of Others," each very different. As Dreyman, Sebastian Koch has the challenge of presenting a man of innate humanity, someone whose inner quality is apparent in his essential being, despite a surface breeziness that could easily be seen as blithe. Koch seems to achieve the desired effect by having Dreyman lavish selfless attention on everyone with whom he comes into contact. It's in those interactions that we read the acute and sensitive understanding of a poet and a hero.
For Ulrich Mühe, as the captain, the challenge is quite different. His surface note is repressed anger. Underneath that is resentment and fear. That means that anything meaningful that reaches him has to blast through layers of rock, cemented by the mortar of ego. He is almost gone, almost buried within himself, but only almost. The facade is repugnant and never really changes, but every so often there's a glint of something or someone underneath.
At the center of these extremes, there's Gedeck as Christa, who has the misfortune of not being morally extraordinary. Recognized as the premier actress of the East German stage, she is otherwise a normal person, perhaps more sensitive and therefore a little weaker than most -- and therefore no match for the intrigues surrounding her. In any other country, her life would be one of ease and glory. Instead, she finds herself systematically trying to deaden herself to the terror and degradation that waits around every corner.
As for the story, it can wait until you see it. Better to talk about moments and meanings: an ugly sexual interlude that says everything you need to know about the captain's lonely private life. Or the scene in which Dreyman plays a requiem in memory of a friend -- a private moment of reflection and pain that the captain hears, seemingly unmoved, over his headphones. (The captain thinks that life is empty because he's empty, but how does he stay unmoved when confronted, day after day, with evidence to the contrary?) And then there's Gedeck's face, at any point in the film, full of feeling and full of the effort not to feel. It's haunting.
The action takes place in 1984, just five years before the collapse of communism but an eternity away. "The Lives of Others" reminds us that, for millions of people, that happy ending came too late.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/16/DDG9IO4PID1.DTL
