The Spies Are Among Us: The Lives of Others

Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung-- German for coming to terms with the past-- is as difficult to realize as it is to pronounce. To what extent is one morally responsible for acts committed under great personal threat? Are individuals capable of learning from their mistakes, let alone entire societies? Is retribution even possible? Encompassing all of these questions, it's no wonder the word is so long. (Nor is it any wonder that the Germans would have coined it.) Spanning three decades, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's new film The Lives of Others follows three East Berliners through their interactions with the DDR's infamous State Security service, the Stasi-and their eventual struggle to come to terms with what they did to survive the government's unwelcome attentions. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe), a Stasi captain and surveillance expert eavesdrops on playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), his suspicion first aroused because the two seem so beyond suspicion. Dreyman, a party official says, is "our only non-subversive writer" and Sieland is the magnetic star of his plays. They seem at first to be no threat to the state, but when Sieland is coerced into an affair with a piggish party official and Dreyman is awoken to the state's brutal suppression of his friends, the couple begins to start thinking and acting towards freedom. Holed up in a secret surveillance room in the attic of the couple's apartment building, Wiesler hears all this develop. But something about the couple speaks to him, and he looks the other way. Wiesler purposefully fails to record Dreyman's increasingly seditious acts, setting in motion a cataclysmic chain of events. As the stakes grow higher, the film's composition grows subtly tighter and more claustrophobic. These small touches-a fisheye lens in certain scenes, sound design increasingly focused on the noise of boots on pavement and floorboards-color the movie's grey Eastern Bloc palate. As the freedom fighting playwright and the tortured, beautiful actress, Koch and Gedeck certainly have the sexiest roles, and they do well with them. But the film's best performance belongs to Muehe. His Wiesler is a spy whose expert ability to fall unnoticed into the background of any setting is at once enabled and blighted by his large, lonely eyes. Watching him scan a crowd, it's hard to tell whether he's taking in information about acts against the state or desperately searching for someone to look back at him. The spy's sadness is riveting; never has it been more fascinating to watch a man in headphones sit alone in a room. Muehe's performance as Wiesler highlights one of the film's more unsettling explorations, the voyeurism of the viewers themselves. Muehe twice refers to himself as Sieland's "audience," and it's not an inaccurate description. (This is particularly true in the later parts of the film, in which Sieland's secret complicity with the state forces her to play the role of herself in front of Dreyman.) But as Muehe watches, we watch Muehe. He goes to a bar, he eats dinner by himself, he begs a prostitute to stay at his apartment just a little while longer, he listens and watches. And just as Muehe softens to the subjects of his surveillance, our one-way intimacy with the spy makes him heartbreakingly sympathetic. How easy and natural it is to betray someone's privacy-any experienced moviegoer would think nothing of it. In its implication of the audience as spies themselves, The Lives of Others recalls a German classic, The Murderers Are Among Us, the first movie filmed in Berlin after the Second World War. A noir-flavored Communist project, the film is about doctor who searches the bombed out city for the man who was his commanding officer in the war, whom the doctor could not prevent from ordering a massacre of innocents. Driven mad by his complicity with the Nazis and his inability to stop the officer's war crimes, the doctor finds the man, follows him, spies on him, corners him, draws a gun,-and lets him go. The Live Of Others ends by keeping its characters similarly restrained. There's no giant battle between good and evil at the end of these films, no one gets quite what's coming to them, and nothing is quite put to bed. This is Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: forgiving without forgetting. It might be impossible, but it makes for great film.