A FILM WORTH LEAVING THE ATTIC FOR

Cinematic allegories and reflections upon contemporary American society have generally come in the guise of science fiction or subversive animation. You know it's getting bad on these shores when one of the decade's most incisive portraits of our nation's condition is a searing melodrama about East Germany circa 1984. Yet Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Lives of Others-the tale of Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a hard-nosed and unquestioning member of the Stasi (East Germany's notorious secret police cum cultural crusaders) -is frightening in its immediacy.

Wiesler spends his days training young recruits to monitor potentially subversive members of the populace (artists, for the most part) and his nights quietly and hypocritically lusting after a free-spirited actress named Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). Much to his conflicted bemusement, Wiesler soon finds himself working as her government-section voyeur; he's assigned to monitor the apartment Christa-Maria shares with her potentially insubordinate playwright lover, Georg (Sebastian Koch). The Stasi installs microphones in their apartment and plants Wiesler in their attic, who forgoes his own life to dote upon the couple's every word and interaction.

Von Donnersmarck, despite the fact that this is his first feature film, allows his rich premise to fully realize its vast potential, both aesthetically and dramatically. His East Germany is a barren, decaying place that is as bankrupt visually as it is ideologically. City rotaries are glimpsed aching with fear at midnight, and the apartment complexes around them are shot so unflatteringly-sterile, yet crumbling-that they appear almost uninhabitable. The people and relationships within them, however, are doing all they can to survive, and Von Donnersmarck uses a ubiquitous sexual energy as a conduit for their vitality.

Regardless of the film's initial focus on Georg's new play and Christa-Maria-his muse-Lives of Others belongs to Wiesler and, by extension, Mühe. Mühe, himself once monitored by the Stasi, brings an incredible virtuosity to a role that could have potentially spiraled into broad theatrics, especially given the dramatic change the character endures as he begins to question the fundamental tenets of fascism. Wiesler's journey from ideologue to decency is riveting and never less than believable, his proclivity for blind evil always threatening to bubble over. To reveal too much of his relationship with the couple he studies would ruin one of recent cinema's most satisfying denouements, but suffice it to say that Wiesler eventually leaves the attic and makes some fateful decisions of his own.

Lives of Others is careful never to become too obvious in its various condemnations, choosing to focus on precise historical misdemeanors rather than larger Orwellian conceits. Yet the narrative's penetrating power easily allows the film's ideas to leap over walls both geographic and chronological. More than a simple discourse on the evils of wire-tapping, Mühe's Wiesler indelibly teaches the brilliant power of lucid thought, unobstructed by rhetoric and thought control. Lives of Others is not only rapturously entertaining but also alarmingly pertinent in unquantifiable ways. If you need a recent example, just ask the Mooninites.