The Best Foreign Film category has always seemed an odd addition to the Oscars, drawing wide and unrelated works together into something like a cinematic ghetto. The decisions it produces are routinely strange and just as arbitrary as the nominations, and this year’s winner, German drama The Lives of Others, proves no exception. In places it’s excellent, in others significantly flawed, but it’s worthy and superficially intelligent and those merits go a long way at Oscar time.

At the film’s heart is Captain Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent who we first meet teaching interrogation techniques to a class of new recruits. Wiesler is an idealist of sorts, with a fastidious devotion to the GDR and its “sword and shield,” the secret police. But his first field mission, wire-tapping writer Georg Dreyman and his partner, actress Christa-Maria Sieland, exposes him to questions and emotions that begin to strip the sureties away from his closeted life. Not only is the party’s interest in Dreyman corrupt - due not to a valid suspicion of guilt but to the Minister of Culture’s plotting to steal his girlfriend - but the writer’s life epitomises everything that’s missing from Wiesler’s. Increasingly the party’s interference in his life drives Dreyman towards rebellion, and Wiesler’s monitoring transforms into a quest to protect his two charges from the attentions of the minister, his own superior, and eventually the entire apparatus of the Stasi.

Wiesler, as played by Ulrich Mühe, is a wonderful character. Given little to work with by a script that shows scant interest in character motivation, Mühe nonetheless remains believable at every stage in his transition from lifeless agent of a totalitarian state to lonely rebel fiercely trying to do the right thing against insurmountable odds. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the rest of the cast. Some of the characters, like the villainous minister, are little more than caricatures. More problematic are the writer and his partner - why Dreyman is loyal at the beginning of the film and then does a u-turn is never convincingly explained, and Christa-Maria’s behaviour seems to have more to do with the writer’s attitudes to women than anything that happens to her in the context of the film.

Added to that is the problem that neither of these characters is particularly interesting or sympathetic - they’re precocious and self-absorbed and it’s hard to care much about their respective fates. Wiesler’s story, on the other hand, is totally absorbing - paradoxically his lack of obvious personality makes him fascinating. The film seems most alive when Mühe is on screen, even when (as is often the case) he’s doing nothing but sitting listening. Similarly, the segments dealing with the Stasi are both intriguing and disturbing. In places The Lives of Others makes the GDR’s fearsome secret police seem strangely quaint, with their bureaucratic approach to the business of total control. At these points, as when we get glimpses into Wiesler’s barren personal life, the film seems almost Kafkaesque, its characters trapped in an inescapable maze of arbitrary rules and twisted logic.

The direction is frequently excellent, the cinematography creates a believably drab atmosphere, and the cast are uniformly good. The sense that these events are taking place in recent history gives the material more power and weight than it might otherwise have. But for every superb scene, there’s another that drags or shies into overly predictable territory - and though it’s never terrible by any means it’s sometimes forced and unconvincing and a little bit dull. Still, while The Lives of Others isn’t the best foreign film of 2006, it remains well worth watching for its many brilliant moments, and particularly for Mühe’s dazzling performance as one of the year’s most unconventional heroes.

No Comments Yet

You can be the first to comment!