Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on February 22, 2007 at 10:42:13

...I had to mull for a few days before committing my thoughts. But now I am convinced, it's a keeper... for the centuries.

Too few films have been made about life under Communists; apparently it's more fun cinematically to torture Nazis, although the death and destruction the former unleashed was greater by a (conservative) factor of ten. The only three that come to mind are Before Night Falls, The Red Violin and Ninotchka -- the last two only in part, but what parts! This film is set almost entirely (and most persuasively) in the political milieu of East Germany in... 1984! Where Big Brother and Big Sister are watching you.

The unlikely hero is Herr Kapitan Wiesler, a Stasi functionary attached to the Ministry of Culture who becomes rather too absorbed in his assignment of watching a popular playwright and his actress girlfriend. Ironically, neither one is considered threatening to the regime, but the Minister of Culture himself has the hots for her and wants the writer dispensed with. Hence, the bugging and the spying, carried out with the usual Stasi efficiency -- except for our man's progressively interfering ways.

One might think here of Coppola's Conversation, but to my mind the key predecessor work is Philip K. Dicks's A Scanner Darkly (the book, not so much the movie). In the many shifting allegiances one never knows where one stands with the other players -- or even with oneself. We see that here in our protagonist without personality who slowly, slowly becomes another sort of servant.

Uppermost in everyones' thoughts at all times is the fearsome apparat of the State, sometimes amusingly, but usually not, as when Comrade Stalin is quoted as having called writers "engineers of the human soul". That bleak, malevolent and knowing view ("wink wink") is confronted head-on by the writer/director of The Lives of Others, who manages to stir our souls instead of chilling them.

This dismaying and masterful film turns the frozen grey tundra of the German Democratic Republic (delineated as well in the selfless cinematography) into green, blue and bright yellow bursts of hope, although not without tragic denoument. And the last line is totally killer; telling it gives nothing away, as you won't see this coming: "It's for me."