Movie: Das Leben Der Anderen
General Info
Title: Das Leben Der Anderen
Year: 2006
In Short
Life in the German Democratic Republic (or the DDR as us Europeans called it) isn’t a bed of roses. Well, probably exactly like a bed of roses if you skip the flowers and think of the thorns, I guess..
The government has a tight grip on lives and minds of its subjects and an ultra-loyal playwright is selected for some serious monitoring. His house is bugged and he and his girlfriend are watched constantly; but one of his observers gets a bit too closely attached to the subject’s life and his girlfriend.
The Movie
Visuals
Very toned down and cold visuals; nothing over-dramatic, but just enough gloom to make you wish Uncle Sam’d storm into your living room and ravage your wife in the name of fast food and liberty.
Plot
Meh, very predictable stuff - you see how this things gonna develop waaay before it happens (read my short description again, that’s it..). More than two hours to show the viewer some very obvious plot developments, hmm…
Cast
Easy pickings: Ulrich Mühe is the only one who gives a solid performance as the introvert and fiercely loyal Stasi snoop that gets too involved with his snoopees.
Conclusion
Too long, too obvious, too late, too nice.
Too late, because this movie deals with the settling of emotional scores concerning the dramas during that period in the GDR. And that should ‘ve been done in the first five years after the Berlin Wall fell. Now it just doesn’t have that much of an impact.
Too nice, if you want to show the frustrating sadness of life in a totalitarian regime, you have to put much more pain and suffering into it. No, I’m not that kind of sadist, but you have to include more emotional elements as used by George Orwell in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. I know it’s easy to fault this movie by comparing it Orwell’s work, but come one, at least give it a try.. Hey, maybe it never was the writer’s idea for this movie to be scary, maybe they wanted to simply make a thriller or something..
Rating: 
(And it won an Oscar?!?)
