
            The Lives of Others is at once a political thriller and a human drama. The film opens in East Berlin in 1984 with a sequence that alternates scenes from an interrogation with scenes from a training class for aspiring officers of the Stasi, or secret police. Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), code name HGW XX/7, is demonstrating his interrogation technique using audio of his own interrogation of a suspect. Wiesler instructs the students on how to tell whether a subject is lying. A student asks a question that Wiesler judges to be a bit too compassionate (read "bourgeois"), and the professor marks the student's name on the attendance record: surely this student has just flunked the course, or worse. During the feature's first thirty minutes, writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck draws a portrait of Wiesler that borders on caricature: Wiesler is a highly skilled officer of the Stasi, a proud, zealous, disciplined and entirely cold-blooded professional. He is one of the many cogs in the wheel of "the System," working anonymously and tirelessly, convinced that his efforts are building a better Socialist society.At the end of the class, Lieutenant-Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), Wiesler's old school friend (and probably his only friend), who has risen to the position of head of the Culture Department at Stasi, comes to invite Wiesler to a theatrical premiere. The play is by the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and its leading character is played by Dreyman's lover, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), an actress of great reputation. Dreyman, who writes plays about the heroic proletariat, lives a rather comfortable life in a plush East Berlin apartment, enjoying a certain notoriety among DDR officials who value him because he's one of the few East German writers whose work is read in the west. He preserves the respect of the artistic community by using his (relatively) secure position for occasional interventions in favor of dissident fellow artists. Wiesler at once suspects that Dreyman's loyalty to the party is not as strong as it would seem on the surface, even if the high party officials are convinced.Following the performance Grubitz has a brief conversation regarding Dreyman with Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who also attended. Hempf is attracted to the leading lady. However, since Dreyman is in the way, he must somehow be eliminated. Hempf, who happens also to be a member of the ZK ("Zentralkomitee") which has authority over the Stasi, tells Grubitz about his reservations regarding the playwright's loyalty to the SED ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands," or Socialist Unity Party), suggesting full-scale surveillance of Dreyman. Grubitz, always eager to better his own political future, asks his friend Wiesler to manage this procedure (the highest level of monitoring of suspected individuals), code-named "Lazlo." (Laszlo is a Hungarian name -- perhaps a reference to the high suicide rates in Hungary, which we'll touch on later.) Soon after, Hempf meets Dreyman and Sieland at a party, and in a rather unsubtle way lets Christa-Maria know of his feelings toward her. He also tweaks Dreyman about the naiveté of the belief displayed in his plays that people change; Hempf is convinced that people never change.Wiesler stalks Dreyman, noting his comings and goings, and while the playwright is away he has Dreyman's apartment systematically bugged. As the bugging team leaves the apartment, Wiesler notices that a neighbor is watching them through the peephole in her door. He knocks and tells the neighbor that if she tells anyone what she saw, her daughter will lose her place at university. Wiesler sets up his surveillance headquarters in the attic, just above the apartment.As Dreyman and Sieland prepare for a party in the flat in honor of Dreyman's fortieth birthday, Sieland presents him with a necktie and reminds him that he promised to wear it. She wonders if he knows how to tie it, and he replies that he's from the middle class and grew up wearing ties; he's since had to transcend his background (presumably to succeed in a socialist state). When he goes into the hall to put on the tie, though, it becomes clear that he was not telling the truth, and he makes a mess of it. He nips across the landing to knock on his neighbor's door and ask her to tie it for him. She comes into his apartment and ties the tie competently, but she's so nervous (about the surveillance) that Dreyman asks whether she's sick -- but of course she can't tell him what's the matter. The neighbor goes home with Christa-Maria none the wiser; she's mildly impressed at Dreyman's unexpected skill with a necktie.At the party Dreyman's close friend, theater director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), is shunned by the other guests. Because Jerska has been blacklisted for his anti-government opinions he hasn't been able to work for years; now people are afraid to be seen talking to him. Jerska's birthday gift to Dreyman is sheet music for a work called Sonata for a Good Man.In a lunchtime scene at Stasi headquarters, a young agent starts to tell a joke about SED leader Erich Honecker. He's overheard and forced to finish it by Grubitz, who then threatens to have him transferred to the most low-level, soul-crushingly boring job available, and finally claims he was kidding.Soon Wiesler's observations indicate that, contrary to his prejudices toward artists as free-thinkers, Dreyman's attitude toward the DDR and its SED is not particularly scornful. In the meantime, Christa-Maria has been "convinced" by Minister Hempf to be receptive to his advances, and when Wiesler finds out about this development, it dawns on him that maybe Operation Lazlo has more to do with the libido of the Minister than with the DDR's security. From his surveillance post, Wiesler makes Dreyman's doorbell ring to draw Dreyman down to the street door in time to see the minister drop Sieland off and tell her when she must meet him again.Dreyman is provoked to take action by the awareness of his lover's coerced sexual relationship with the minister and the suicide of his blacklisted friend Jerska. After learning of Jerska's death, Dreyman sits at his piano and plays the piece Jerska gave him, the Sonata for a Good Man. Wiesler, listening in the attic, is moved to tears by the music. Christa-Maria comes in and Dreyman quotes Lenin saying if he'd kept listening to Beethoven's Appassionata he'd never have finished the revolution. Then he asks, "Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?"In the following scene, a small child in an elevator asks Wiesler if he's really with the Stasi, and confides that his father says Stasi agents are bad men who put people in prison. Wiesler starts to ask the boy his father's name, but stops himself.The film showcases Wiesler's empty life -- he apparently has no family -- in an episode with a prostitute. After sex he asks her to stay a little while, but she has another appointment. Saying that he needs to reserve any time he wants in advance, she leaves him alone.Dreyman resolves to help reveal the true face of the DDR government to the outside world. With the help of well-positioned West Germans who provide him with a typewriter that can't be traced back to him, he plans to publish an anonymous exposé in one of the leading West German weeklies, Der Spiegel. The article concerns the DDR government's cover-up of the high suicide rate in East Germany; the government stopped collecting suicide statistics in 1977, at which time East Germany's suicide rate was higher than that of every other country in Europe except for Hungary.As they work on the article, Dreyman's friends worry about being overheard. Dreyman is sure his apartment isn't bugged, but his friends suspect otherwise. They devise a test: a contact in West Germany comes to visit Dreyman's flat and they discuss his plans to return to West Germany with his son, an East German citizen, hidden under the seat of his car. They describe the car, a gold Mercedes, and the intended route, then announce their departure. Wiesler hears everything but decides not to tip off the border guards. When the car makes it across the border, Dreyman and his friends conclude that his apartment is safe and unbugged.Wiesler has heard enough by now to know that Dreyman is writing something that will be smuggled out for publication in West Germany; he's in a position to provide a victory to the DDR and a feather in his own professional cap by foiling Dreyman's plot. However, Wiesler is starting to waver in his determination to bring Operation Lazlo to its conclusion. In the process of snooping in his victims' everyday lives, including their love lives, he has unconsciously been drawn into their world, which in turn has put his own in question. At one point, he approaches a despondent Christa-Maria in a café to tell her how much he admires her work. She replies that he's a good man. He does not tell her his name. When Wiesler returns to the surveillance post, he learns that Christa-Maria went home to Dreyman, skipping her appointment with the minister, and that she won't see the minister again.When Dreyman's article is finally published in the West, it is a public disaster for the DDR, and the playwright becomes a prime suspect. Grubitz is incredulous that with all his expertise, Wiesler could have missed the indications that Dreyman was writing the article. (Wiesler, like Dreyman, has relied on Dreyman's cover story that he's writing a play in honor of the DDR's 40th anniversary.) Minister Hempf uses Christa-Maria's drug addiction as an excuse to have her arrested and threatens to terminate her acting career unless she collaborates with the authorities and denounces her lover as the author of the embarrassing article, which she does. The Stasi searches Dreyman's apartment, but comes up empty-handed.Now Wiesler, who had withheld evidence concerning the source of the article, must decide where his allegiances lie: with the DDR and his brilliant career as a top Stasi officer, or with Dreyman and Christa-Maria, whose honest lives he has come to appreciate. In a tense scene, he sits in an interrogation room as Christa-Maria is brought in, knowing that she will recognize him from their encounter at the café and that Grubitz is watching through the one-way glass. But Sieland is too good an actress to give anything away. Wiesler offers her a choice: never work in the theater again, or become an informant and tell him where Dreyman has hidden the typewriter he used to write the suicide article. He tells her that they already have enough evidence to put Dreyman in jail, so there's nothing she can do for him, but she can save herself and hide her involvement with the Stasi. She agrees, miserably.Wiesler rushes to reach Dreyman's apartment before the rest of the Stasi search team. He extracts the typewriter from its hiding-place and spirits it away. A newly released Christa-Maria comes home and feeds Dreyman a line about being away in the country; she's in the shower when the Stasi team arrives and she emerges in her bathrobe in time to see Grubitz start to pry up the floorboard that still, she believes, conceals the typewriter. She makes bleak eye contact with Dreyman, who knows she must have told them where to look. She leaves the house before Grubitz can get the board up to reveal -- nothing. When she reaches the street, Christa-Maria steps deliberately into the path of a truck and is hit. Wiesler speaks to her briefly as she lies bleeding in the road, but retreats as Dreyman embraces her and apologizes; he believes she removed the typewriter. She dies. Grubitz, who seems slightly abashed by this development, calls off the investigation. However, he tells Wiesler that although Wiesler was clever enough to leave no tracks, Grubitz knows he covered for Dreyman. Grubitz assures Wiesler that he will spend the remaining 20 years of his career steaming open the correspondence of his fellow citizens in a dank Stasi basement.About five years later Wiesler is, indeed, steaming letters open in a basement office; a colleague behind him is listening to the radio. (It's the same young officer who got in trouble for telling a joke about SED leader Erich Honecker -- demoted despite Grubnitz's assurance that he was kidding about punishing him.) The young officer hears on the radio that the Berlin Wall has fallen and shares his earpiece so Wiesler can listen too. When Wiesler gets up and walks out of the Stasi office, the other workers follow him.Two years later, Dreyman runs into ex-Minister Hempf (who has survived the political upheaval very well, thank you), and asks him why his (Dreyman's) apartment was never bugged. Hempf (before throwing in a spurious insult about Dreyman's inability to sexually satisfy Christa-Maria) assures Dreyman that his home was thoroughly bugged, tells him about Operation Lazlo, and advises him to look behind his light switches. Dreyman does so, and then visits the Stasi archives, which have been made public. In the lengthy records of Operation Lazlo, he discovers gaps covering evidence that would have been damning, along with beneficial misinformation, all attributed to a Stasi agent identified as HGW XX/7. He also learns that Christa-Maria was released from custody too late to have extracted the typewriter from its hiding place, and he notices a red fingerprint on one of the pages -- left there by an agent who must have handled the mysteriously missing typewriter with its distinctive red ribbon. The file's final entry notes the transfer and demotion of HGW XX/7, who is blamed for the failure of the operation. Dreyman looks up HGW XX/7's real name and tracks down Wiesler (who now delivers mail for a living), but doesn't speak to him.Two year later still, Wiesler walks past a bookstore advertising a new release with huge posters of the author's face. The book, billed as a novel, is called Sonata for a Good Man, and the author is Georg Dreyman. Wiesler goes inside, opens a copy, and reads the dedication: to HGW XX/7, in gratitude. At the checkout counter the clerk asks whether he should giftwrap the book, and Wiesler replies, "no, it's for me."
    

The Lives of Others


            
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Earth


            The action takes place in a German village in the fifteen months that precede World War I.Among the people who live there are a baron, who is a large landowner and a local moral authority, his estate manager, a pastor with his many children, a widowed doctor and a schoolteacher who is thinking of getting married. It is he who, many years later, tells this story.Though everything seems to be quiet and orderly, as it always has been, with the seasons following each other, and good harvests following bad ones, suddenly some strange events start to occur. If some appear to be quite ordinary, even accidental -- a farmer's wife dies falling through rotten floorboards -- others are inexplicable and may well be malevolent.Thus, a wire placed at knee-height has brought down the horse being ridden by the doctor, who is severely wounded.There's more of the same: an unknown hand opens a window to expose a newborn baby to the intense cold of the winter. A whole field of cabbages, on the baron's land, are beheaded with a scythe. One of the Baron's sons disappears: he is found his feet and hands bound, his buttocks lashed by a whip. A barn belonging to the manor is set on fire. A farmer hangs himself. A midwife's handicapped child is found tied to a tree, in a forest, seriously beaten, with a threatening message on his chest speaking of divine punishment.The village is worried, and at a loss as to what to do. The baron whose wife will soon leave the village to go to live in Italy makes a speech in the church, but it has no effect. The pastor, a particularly strict character, had since the beginning of the events, tied a white ribbon to the arm of his two eldest children, a boy and a girl: it is to remind them permanently of their duties to purity. In spite of these ribbons, his own family is not spared. His eldest son admits that he masturbates. The pastor's pet bird is stabbed with a scissor by the pastor's daughter.The schoolteacher, whose pupils are growing more and more unruly, and who is considering getting married (it is the only love-story in the film), starts little by little to unravel the mystery. What he discovers seems incredible to him: those guilty of most of these misdeeds are the village children. They have formed a secret society and their leader seems to be Klara, the pastor's daughter.Why did the children behave this way? The schoolteacher can't say. They are haunted by dark feelings, fears, a desire to revolt, to dominate, to conceal, to be violent. All this is heralding something that will explode fifteen or twenty years later, when this generation has grown up.The schoolteacher tries to reveal what he thinks he has found out to the pastor. He is rebuffed. There's no question of bringing that out into the open. The pastor insults him, and even threatens to report him. Our children guilty? It's inconceivable.We learn that the Archduke of Austria has been murdered by a Serbian in Sarajevo. An international crisis is brewing.The worries and the dramas of the village are soon lost in the strange excitement of the coming war. Later, the schoolteacher ponders over it again: didn't those events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed? Weren't the barbaric acts of the children, deep down, the natural consequences of what they had been taught? [www.cinemas-online.co.uk]
    

The White Ribbon

Seraphine

The Ax

John Rabe

Amen.

The Chosen Ones

Within the Whirlwind

Operation Valkyrie

Rommel

Moon Man

Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace


            We first see psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) going through his daily routine, getting up in the morning, taking the train to work, and talking to his patients in their group therapy sessions. However, there is an underlying sadness about Chris, which we'll learn more about later.One evening, Chris cuts his finger by accident in the kitchen while making dinner and washes the finger under the faucet and looks at the cut. (Important later on). He is then visited by two men who give him a video message from his friend, Dr. Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur), who has relayed this message from Prometheus, a space station in orbit around the planet Solaris. Solaris is an ocean planet that is being researched for its commercial or resource potential. Dr. Gibarian implores Chris to come to the space station, not explaining why exactly, but that something incredible has happened and that he has to come and see for himself. The two men explain to Chris that contact has been lost with the space station; an intervention team was sent and not heard from again. The government may abandon the station and the crew unless Chris travels up there to find out what happened.Chris makes the trip to the space station and upon arrival finds it mostly empty. However, stains of blood are everywhere on the walls. He stumbles upon a makeshift morgue and is devastated to find Dr. Gibarian as one of two dead people on the slab. As Chris leaves the room, he fails to notice blood accumulating in the ceiling panels.He proceeds to find only two survivors of the crew in the space station. The first is a young man named Snow (Jeremy Davies) who is EXTREMELY WEIRD, and only provides very vague and confusing answers. Chris learns that Dr. Gibarian committed suicide. Chris asks about doctor Coutard who was also supposed to be on board. Snow says the doctor was killed by an intervention team when he tried to escape from them. One other doctor has simply vanished; the only thing they know is that he is no longer aboard the station. Chris then proceeds to the other survivor, a woman named Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis). She has locked herself in her room because she is traumatized by what has happened to her and the others. Chris can hear another person stumbling inside her room, but she refuses to let him in. Both Snow and Gordon make it clear that discussing their issues is of no use unless the same things start happening to Kelvin.A little boy suddenly runs around the corridor. Chris tries to catch up to boy but loses him. Dr. Snow tells him it is Dr. Gibarian's son. When asked how the boy could be on board, Snow remains vague, but implies that this is part of the problems everyone is experiencing.Chris successfully coaxes Dr. Gordon out of her room and discusses her frail mental state, although she remains elusive about what caused it. Chris goes to bed and dreams about his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), the time they first met, their courtship and making love to her. When Chris wakes up in the morning, Rheya is right beside him in bed. Chris jumps out of bed all freaked out. He asks how she got here, but Rheya doesn't seem to know what he means by that and continues to act as if they were still married. Chris realizes that Rheya cannot be real because Rheya has been dead for years. Chris tricks her into going into an escape pod and seals it shut. He sends her out to space and then breaks down crying.Chris receives Snow, who explains that Solaris is responsible for all of this. The planet is somehow able to read the minds of the scientists during sleep, and conjures up a living facsimile of their most beloved. Snow himself got a visit from his brother. The boy they saw earlier was actually a replica of Gibarian's son who appeared out of nowhere. Snow tells Chris that Rheya will appear again if he wants her to.The next night, Chris dreams about Rheya and in the morning, she's there in bed with him again. She is another copy and totally unaware of the first one. Chris asks her what she remembers and all she knows is her life with him. She has no clue how she arrived at the space station. Chris decides to let her stay with him, and tells Snow that the second Rheya may never know about what he did to the first.In time, Rheya has thoughts of her own and begins to have doubts about who she really is. She has all the memories of her life with Chris, but they do not feel like they belong to her. To her distress, she starts to remember that she suffered from a bad childhood and depressions. When she got pregnant once, she had an abortion without telling Chris, who left her furiously. She then committed suicide.All aboard have a meeting. They speculate how the planet creates these visitors from matter, and theorize how they could permanently dissolve them with a certain type of radiation. Against Gordon's judgement, Chris theorizes that Solaris is giving him a second chance with his wife, and he wants to take her home to Earth. Gordon thinks otherwise; more visitors could follow, some could go to Earth, and the effects may be devastating. She thinks that Rheya should be vaporized immediately, but Chris refuses and intends to carry on his relationship with Rheya. Gordon spills out to Rheya about the first copy of Rheya that Chris had sent out to space. Rheya is apalled and leaves. Chris is angered, but Gordon stresses that the visitors are not human, and that it is too dangerous to treat them as such.That night, Chris has a dream in which he talks to Gibarian about the visitors. Gibarian implies that he communicates for Solaris. Chris wants to know what Solaris wants from them. Gibarian says that they cannot be sure, and the planet may not even have plans for them; there are no answers, only choices. Chris awakens, and finds Rheya missing. He searches for her and finds her lying on the floor: she has killed herself by drinking liquid oxygen, her face burned where it was in contact with the oxygen.Chris brings her back to his bed where he, Gordon and Snow witness her facial wound suddenly healing itself. Gordon states that she hates watching "their resurrection". Rheya is distraught that she is alive again; she feels that she is not Rheya and therefore should not exist. There is a sudden power drain: Gordon has finished the special weapon and 'tested' it successfully on her visitor. Gordon warns Chris that Rheya will most likely try to kill herself again. Chris becomes determined to protect Rheya. He locks the door and starts taking pills to stay awake, in order to keep an eye on her.Rheya tells Chris that he 'remembered her wrong'; she is depressed and suicidal because that is how Chris remembers her. However, Chris vows to Rheya that they can be happy together and start anew, despite her doubts. In spite of his efforts, Chris falls asleep, dreaming about the breakup with Rheya that led to her suicide from sleeping pills; Chris found her and blamed himself for her death. She left Chris' favorite poem as a suicide note. When Chris wakes up, he finds the door ripped open; Rheya has broken out and has asked Gordon to vaporize her, but not before leaving a goodbye video message for Chris: she states that she can never be the real Rheya, and that it is better this way; she found the suicide note from the real Rheya that Chris had brought with him from Earth, and left it for him to find, again.Chris confronts Gordon in the makeshift morgue and gets angry at her for letting Rheya die; Gordon simply maintains that she only fulfilled Rheya's wish. Suddenly, they look up to the ceiling and see a large patch of blood. Chris opens up the ceiling tile and finds the body of doctor Snow, the cold having preserved the body. They both confront Snow and he admits to killing the doctor because it turns out that.... Snow himself is a visitor! He was the doctor's visitor and the doctor attempted to kill him within 30 seconds of his appearance, but the fake Snow didn't understand why or what was going on, killed the doctor in self-defense and stuffed his body in the ceiling.Gordon advises to vaporize Snow immediately, however Snow warns them that since vaporizing the other visitors, Solaris has increased it mass and the vaporizing equipment has used up most of the station's energy. The entire space station begins to descend towards the planet Solaris. Snow tells Chris and Gordon to evacuate by an escape pod while he stays behind to meet his doom. Chris and Gordon suit up and head towards the escape pod, making preparations to leave.We suddenly see Chris back on Earth, trying to resume his Earth life. He has no idea how long he has been back. While in his kitchen making dinner, he cuts his finger, like before, and rinses it out under the faucet. As he looks at the cut, it begins to heal itself and disappears. Chris suddenly remembers being back on the Prometheus, having second thoughts about escaping, and staying behind. Gordon goes off in the pod by herself as Chris turns back. As the Prometheus starts rocking, Chris is unable to stand on his feet and collapses to the floor. The little boy shows up, walks over and holds Chris' hand as Solaris comes closer. Back in his kitchen, Chris looks up and sees Rheya standing before him. Chris asks her if he is alive or dead; she replies that those words no longer have any meaning, and that their regrets no longer matter, or words to that effect. They embrace as the camera zooms out on Solaris.Now the question is: Is Chris dead and in heaven with Rheya? Or is he in Solaris with another copy of his wife? Or is she the real Rheya? Is Chris himself still real?
    

Ulrich Tukur

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