Or, “The Lives Of Others.” This German movie of 2006 won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for that year, and without having seen the other candidates I feel I’m justified in guessing that it most likely was. My friend and I checked it out last week; she’d seen it before and recommended it, and I was blown away.
Ulrich Mühe plays an East German Stasi Commandant who is tasked with surveilling a popular and well-connected playwright, who despite having a clean record has crossed the wrong person. Despite his strict training, he becomes taken with the author and his girlfriend and, finding out that they are indeed involved with dissidents, decides to not so much help them as cover up what he has found. Complications ensue.
I don’t want to give anything away, because the story is so interesting and so brilliantly evocative of a terrible time in European history. At its worst, the Stasi had compromised roughly half of the people in East Germany, meaning that on some level every other person was spying on the person next to them. Their techniques, as outlined in the film, were incredibly sophisticated and subtle (while, of course, being totally overwhelming to the average person). And it demonstrates that peculiarly German habit of applying the highest levels of efficiency and dedication to a given task without giving the slightest thought to the moral or ethical implications of it. (Don’t accuse me of being anti-German, by the way; I’m only about 1/8 Irish, the rest German.)
But that just makes the last two or three scenes even more wonderful and poignant.
Anyway, Mühe’s performance is one to see. He portrays a man who’s been trained for decades to never let on what he’s thinking. So his allowed range of facial and bodily expressions is very tightly controlled. Yet he expresses a great range of emotions just with a subtle shift of his eyes, or a slump of the shoulders. Brilliant and subtle work.
Check it out on PPV or Netflix, you won’t be disappointed.