The Lives of Others

The German film, The Lives of Others, took me easily out of my world, here at the lake, and set me in East Germany, during the 80's. If, as the book PLAY suggests, a movie can be a form of play, then this movie fits the definition. The two main characters, one, a Stasi agent, someone out of Orwell's 1984, a true believer, with no life other than his work, saving socialism from vermin like his alto ego, the liberal playwright, whose life, unlike the Stasi agent, is filled with ideas, love, women, art, but mostly human emotion, something that seems lacking in everything that surrounds the Stasi. The film takes off when Stasi begins to follow the playwright's life, through mikes and other apparatus set up in the apartment. Gradually, he begins to sympathize with the lives of artists, mostly because he begins to sense the emptiness and futility of his own life, and by extension, the lunacy of spying to preserve something that does not deserve preserving. If anything rings inauthenticate, it's that all of the agents and their apparatus seem typical, grasping, lecherous, power hungry, as they wield their way. Towards the end, the Stasi agent attempts to save the lives of the artist and lover but she, because she had earlier betrayed the playwright, runs into the street in front of a car. As a result of his attempt to save the two, Stasi ends up being demoted, and lives the rest of his life in mundanity of office life. With 1989, things change, the playwright through the freedom of information act, discovers his house had been bugged, realizes the truth, and finds out that the Stasi official actually tried to save his life. He attemtps to meet him, sees him delivering mail, but cannot quite make himself do it. Two years later, a book appears, The Life of a Good Man, the playwrights recreation of the Stasi officia'ls metamorphosis in to a caring human being. The play ends with Stasi seeing the book jacket in a bookstore; he goes in, buys it, and the movie ends. Great peformances by the two male leads, perfectly cast, one mouse like, always dressed in gray, the other flayboyant, good looking, very theatrical and passionate.