Review: Das Leben der Anderen

Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)
A film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Dendy Opera Quays
26 March 2007

About ten years ago, before the world turned itself on its head after a bombing in New York, I was a student studying theatre theory in a university in England. It was the first time that I had been out of the country on my own, leaving the safety of Sydney in summer and arriving in the rainy industrial north of Manchester.

Wide eyed and bushy tailed, I made myself at home in a dormitory on the road south towards Old Trafford. Students from all parts of the UK and the continent had converged on this small part of the world in the middle of a bitter winter.

My time there was spent traversing between the dark lecture theatres of the university filling my head with Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and loitering in the public houses.

While gallivanting, I met an East Berlin girl who had come to do a masters in accounting. At the time, my naive thoughts of East Berlin were centred around an imagination that everything in that part of the world was still in black and white.

We fell in love and I travelled with her to her city, since unified. The architecture, the atmosphere, the people, the smell of the streets are something that I will never forget and it gave birth to a fascination I have had with central and eastern Europe ever since.

A decade later and I suddenly find myself at a film that captures East Berlin in all its shadows and humanity with a scent that is as unique as going there yourself.

Fleeing the circular quay tourists with their heads buried in pasta, pizza, mussels and chenin blanc we escape into the basement cinema of Dendy. The place is packed and we manage to squeeze into a space a couple of rows from the front.

Every now and again, you enter the world of a movie that takes you completely by surprise. And its fair to say that Das Leben der Anderen is a film that I will recall for a very long time.

It's the atmosphere of the film that captures you first. The colour of the people, their clothes, the seats and furnishings. It's 1984.

Centred around a senior Stasi agent assigned to spy on a successful playwright and his actress girlfriend, this film gallops between the world of personal responsibility and political suspicion and comes crashing down into an engrossing world of thrilling passion that is disarming.

It is the power and belief of the individual that takes you most by surprise. From the Stasi boss, to the theatre community around the playwright to the self serving government ministers.

It is believed that around 100,000 people within the East Berlin populus were employed by the Stasi to spy on das leben der anderen. This backdrop allows von Donnersmarck to explore a depth in the journey of character that is one of the finest I have seen.

The script is tight, the original score compelling, the synopsis devastating and the Brechtian elements fascinating. It engages with you at once emotionally and the tension that builds is quiet but constant. It shifts between the power brokers inside the regime and seeps back to the commune of the society it is watching.

It says more about the post New York bombing world than any political satire or opinion piece could ever hope to capture. It's a film that you must go and see on the big screen.


English version website here.
Deutsche offizielle webseite hier.


Photo: Ulrich Mühe as Captain Gerd Wiesler
Image Credit: Hagan Keller, courtesy of Buena Vista International