| VERGANGENHEITSBEWAELTIGUNG, OR, SILLY BUGGERS : F.H. Von Donnersmarck's 'The Lives of Others' [6/10] |
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| Wednesday, 09 May 2007 | |
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In the land of Martin Luther and Leopold von Ranke, driven by a distinctly Protestant passion to confront past sins, the forcefully stated wish of a few East German dissidents to expose the crimes of the regime, and the desire of many West Germans (especially those from the class of '68) not to repeat the mistakes made in covering up and forgetting the evils of Nazism after 1949, we saw an unprecedentedly swift, far-reaching, and systematic opening of the more than 110 miles of Stasi files. The second time around, forty years on, Germany was bent on getting its Vergangenheitsbewältigung, its past-beating, just right. ... After some hesitation, I decided to go back and see if I had a Stasi file. I did. I read it and was deeply stirred by its minute-by-minute record of my past life: 325 pages of poisoned madeleine. Timothy Garton Ash, The New York Review of Books, May 2007 It may seem an unlikely comparison, but The Lives of Others is this year's Vera Drake. Both films were famously - and, in the light of their subsequent success, very controversially - rejected from Cannes competition (Lives of Others having previously also suffered the same fate from the Berlinale's selectors); both went on to wow audiences, critics and juries on the worldwide film-festival circuit, accumulating many prizes and much acclaim; both later achieved Oscar recognition (Vera Drake nominated for Best Director, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay; Lives of Others winner of Best Foreign Film.) Both are impeccably well-intentioned, 'well-made', liberal-minded period-pieces, atmospherically (if conventionally) dramatising - in a restrained, downbeat fashion only occasionally leavened by humour - fictional events which unfold place in a relatively recent past, in gloomily-lit bad-old-days locales notable for their stultifying greyey-greeny drabness and repressive uniformity (late-fifties London / early-eighties East Berlin); both are constructed around an outstanding, subtle, impossible-to-dislike lead performance (Imelda Staunton / Ulrich Mühe); both are potentially outstanding works, ultimately hampered by the schematic nature of screenplays which hover too closely on the verge of stereotype and melodrama to properly address the harrowingly serious and still-topical subjects they seek to address. In the case of The Lives of Others, the focus is on the dog days of the GDR, when the Berliner Mauer was still very much in place and perestroika and glasnost merely words in a Russian dictionary. It's 1984, and among the country's few cultural artists of major European significance is playwright Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). But while Dreyman gives every outward sign of being a dyed-in-the-wool card-carrying socialist, his high profile brings him to the scrutiny of Cultural Department chief Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) - who puts one of the best surveillance men in the secret police ('Stasi') on the job. Said operative, Wiesler (Mühe) is a grey, self-effacing indivual whose dedication to his job borders on the obsessional. He instals himself in the empty apartment directly above his target's flat, and as he eavesdrops on Dreyman and his partner/muse Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck) - who also happens to be the GDR's most acclaimed stage-actress - Wiesler finds himself responding to "the lives of others" in ways he's never previously experienced. But he discovers no hint of dissidence and reports as much to Grubitz and his boss Hempf (Thomas Thieme) - the latter desperate to unearth 'dirt' on Dreymann to facilitate his access to Christa-Maria, for whom he has conceived an amour fou. Wiesler thus finds himself trapped in a nightmarish moral maze - placing further strain on his previously rock-solid equilibrium... There's an awful lot to like about The Lives of Others, not least the attention to period detail - Gabriele Binder's costume-design is outstanding. The widescreen cinematography by Hagen Bogdanski (whose previous credit is 2005's Antibodies) is a consistent pleasure, though thankfully never to the extent that he could be accused of aestheticising or 'prettying up' a particularly grim time in a particularly grim place. Writer-director Henckel Von Donnersmarck clearly shows much promise - not to mention a surprising level of assurance considering his previous experience principally comprises a handful of well-received shorts (most of them apparently in the vein of horror or fantasy). One of the neatest aspects of the script is the way Wiesler becomes as much of a 'dramatist' as the man he's spying on, silently manipulating events 'downstairs' to achieve his desired effects (he even marks out the Dreymans' furniture in chalk on the bare boards of his spartan garret.) But there's really nothing very much fresh or original here - indeed, echoes of Coppola's The Conversation become off-puttingly deafening and proceedings unfold, and the direction falls back on visual and aural cliche to an offputting degree. There's a particularly crucial plot development involving a hidden typewriter which strains plausibility beyond breaking-point, and while the transition of Wiesler from GDR automaton to something resembling a fully-rounded human being is handled with skill and sensitivity (unlike the film as a whole, Mühe entirely deserves all the glowing accolades that he's received), Dreymann and his long-suffering partner Christa-Maria aren't developed or fleshed out to anything like the same degree. Indeed, the latter's story-arc is sorely predictable from almost her very first appearance. Koch was much better served by the rather flashier (but more genuinely morally challenging) delights of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (in which he played the disarmingly 'decent' SS officer) - a film which, at 145 minutes, somehow comes across as significantly shorter than the The Lives of Others. We feel every second of the latter's 138 minutes - the picture has a decidedly padded-out feel, and is awkwardly protracted via a series of 'aftermath' codas which don't really add a great deal to our understanding or satisfaction. Of course, it's churlish to even mention length in this context - considering the citizens of the GDR had to endure decades, not mere hours, of oppression. Neil Young 20th May, 2007 THE LIVES OF OTHERS : [6/10] : Das Leben der Anderen : Germany 2006 : Florian HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK : 138 mins (BBFC timing) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Gateshead (UK), 7th May 2007 - public show (paid £6.20) - digital projection |
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