Our answer to dictatorship
- 26.11.2007, 12:58
Film The Lives of Others by German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck became a winner of the XIV Minsk International festival Listapad.
The film describes the events 5 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The case is not in the material signs of the epoch: portraits of Erich Honecker, Trabants in the streets and deutsche schlager LPs. The thing is in feeling of inner fear, which is shown in every shot of the film. The fear of System and its material embodiment – powerful GDR secret service Stasi, a hybrid of Gestapo and KGB.
Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler is a model cog in a totalitarian machine. On Party’s order he is able to torture enemies of socialism and lecture students of state security school on torture methods. He has no private life, no affections or food preferences. He looks like an exemplary spy – one can meet him in crowd but can never remember him. Playwright Georg Dreyman is, on the contrary, a handsome man, the toffs of artistic elite of GDR, who is in good standings with the authorities. But minister of culture, former Stasi agent, fell for Dreyman’s civil wife, an actress. Wiesler is ordered to find damaging information on Dreyman. Wiesler equips secret surveillance station in the block of flats, where the playwriter’s apartment is situated, and begins to spy. Here the cog falls out of the machine...
Like character of The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola, the spy begins to live the life of the persons under his control. Role Wiesler in Donnersmarck’s film is a triumph of Ulrich Mühe and European actor school in general. The Mühe’s character is in more difficult situation than Stirlitz was: the latter was supported by powerful state. Modest carrier-minder Wiesler fights against the system alone, the main battle field is in his soul. Wiesler understands what will be the consequences in case he is unmasked. He knows if he reveals Dreyman, he will advance in office, but he will meet inner blank and loneliness. Mühe’s acting allows to feel the doubts of his character, not only see them.
Character of Ulrich Mühe overcomes the worldly pleasures and wins the battle against System, refusing carrier, money and success in life. Until the fall o f Berlin Wall he works in Stasi perusal post department, where he steam-opens letters. After Germany reunification he finds himself on the downward path: he delivers post. He doesn’t wait for an award. But it finds him in the form of devotion in Dreyman’s new novel. The moment of higher justice is felt in that moment. Even only for that feeling it was worthy to shot a film.
Cult Russian musical critic Artemy Troitski assures on the pages of his youth musical edition, that the Lives of Others will be never shown in today’s Russia. He also gives an advice to “watch the film at home with drapes drawn.” But the film was shown even in today’s Belarus.
It is rather symptomatic, that a film evoking feelings of protest against social system, where fear and dictatorship rule, became a winner at the festival Listapad, which has become a rather para-governmental event. It should be reminded that a film, highly estimated by watchers, wins the festival.
The fact, that the organisers fairly counted the results of voting unlike the counting the results of political “election” is symptomatic, too. Although no observers, independent or international, didn’t watch the vote count.
