by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
A Rated R 134 min
This penetrating German film, written and directed by Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, won an Oscar in 2006 for best foreign film. Donnersmarck’s bleak mosaic depicts the dismal, oppressed lives of the East Germans under Communist rule. In this paranoid system, the ruthless secret police (known as the Stasi) are everywhere, following or surveilling almost everyone. Artists and intellectuals, such as writers, poets, actors, and college professors, were automatically suspected of sedition. Their houses were bugged and bulging files were kept on each one of them.
Stasi goons in trenchcoats (100,000 strong with 200,000 informers) had sweeping powers of arrest without probable cause. Speaking out publicly and criticizing the government would get an individual a one-way ticket to a hell-hole gulag, where he or she would be tortured and held indefinitely. But just across the Berlin Wall, freedom beckoned.
Set in 1986, three years before Glasnost brought down the Wall, many East Berliners risked their lives to escape to the West. This is the story of a writer, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his girlfiriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Matina Bedeck), an actress. The couple is trying to practice their respective arts while living within the narrow government guidelines. Clearly, it was impossible.
Unbeknownst to Georg, his house is bugged, even the bathroom, and every word he or Christa-Maria utters is recorded and typed out by a seemingly emotionless Stasi officer, Capt Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe), who is secretly living vicariously through Georg’s rich social life and is in love with Christa-Maria. Later in the film he intervenes in an ironic twist in the story to save Georg and Christa-Maria from arrest.
As Wiesler listens day after day, he begins to sympathize with Georg’s feelings of frustration at being trapped in the East German Marxist system, which does not allow him any freedom of expression. Christa-Maria is addicted to prescription drugs that make her vulnerable to manipulation by the Stasi. She is forced to have an affair with a high raking Stasi officer, Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who gets her pills for her. Of course, this betrayal of her lover causes her much guilt and shame.
Unhappy with his life in East Germany, Georg decides to speak out by writing a magazine article under a nom de plume about the East German cover-up of the high suicide rate in the country. The Stasi are thorough. They investigate the makes of typewriters that could have written this article. Georg is given a special typewriter that he hides under a doorway sill. However, the Stasi kingpin is convinced Georg wrote the piece, and has his house searched several times without finding the typewriter.
Frustrated by lack of evidence on Georg, Hempf orders Wiesler to get something on Georg or he will be disciplined. Wiesler resists these orders and continues to file favorable reports on Georg. Finally, Hempf has Christa-Maria picked up and interrogated by Wiesler, who asks her where the typewriter is hidden. She refuses to answer and is thrown into solitary confinement without her pills. Soon she goes into withdrawl and is willing to talk to get her pills.
Donnersmarck’s re-creation of the austaire East German communist state sets the stage for his savvy character development. The story is leading up to the fall of the communist block and the reunification of Germany in 1989. The Stasi officers are tentacles of Minister Hempf’s sadistic campaign to bring down Georg and ruin Christa-Maria’s life. Ulrich Muehe effectively captures Gerd Wiesler’s inner conflicts of a man trying to find his emotional core, but who is forced to be a robotic pawn in Hempf’s machinations. When the Berlin Wall is finally brought down, lives are changed forever. This amazing film gives viewers a shocking look at oppressive governments and how paranoia infects everyone like the plague. Viewers leave the theater thanking God that we live in a free democratic country.
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EU Critic’s Choice Awards
