The Lives of Others

I have been experiencing a movie slump of late - we've been going through a dry patch of decent movies. So needless to say, I had high expectations for this Best Foreign Film Oscar winner. I passed up a free V-Festival ticket to see it, so if it was anything less than spectacular i was going to be disappointed.

My god. Disappointd could not be further from the actual state of affairs. Pan's Labyrinth was the favourite to win the Oscar, but this was in no way a real upset - how anyone could say that this was less deserving would be beyond me.

The Lives of Others was set in East Germany in the 80s, before the wall came down. Without giving too much away, it's about the Stasi (State Security) surveillance of 'suspicious', potentially subversive artists. Basically, an artist and his actress wife come to the attention of the Stasi, and their apartment is bugged and they begin to be closely watched. The agent put in charge of their case becomes emotionally involved, and the plot is built from there. To say anything else would give it away.

For me, the success of this film lay in the subtlety. The plot could easily have become so convoluted and detracted from the themes, but instead it was restrained and relatively simple, and the facts spoke for themselves. The timing of release couldn't have been better, and the air of suspicion that had fallen over East Germany at the time recalls McCarthyism and Guantanamo Bay.

The subtlety continued over to the technicalities of the film - the score was gorgeous and fitting but never obtrusive. The visuals were stunning, it was gorgeous to look at in a very simple, stripped back way that allowed full immersion into bleak political and social climate of East Germany, without being manipulative.

The people I saw this movie with asked me afterwards if I had cried and my answer was that I was too profoundly moved to think about crying. The emotions, the politics and the human interactions in this film really did enough talking and there was no need for fancy gimmicks to artificially satisfy me. The ending involved a few jumps forward in time and one very poignant moment capped it off - it could so easily have gone awry but stayed dead on track the whole time.

Adding to the greatness of this movie was the fact that apparently the actor who plays the Stasi member monitoring the couple under suspicion was himself monitored in the 80s in East Germany.

I really just can't pick a flaw.

10