Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

He sits like a man taking a hearing test, big headphones clamped over his ears, his body and face frozen, listening for a faraway sound. His name is Gerd Wiesler, and he is a captain in the Stasi, the notorious secret police of East Germany. The year is, appropriately, 1984, and he is Big Brother, watching. He sits in an attic day after day, night after night, spying on the people in the flat below.
The flat is occupied by a playwright named Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his mistress, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe) first saw Dreyman at the opening of one of his plays, where he was informed by a colleague that Dreyman was a valuable man: "One of our only writers who is read in the West and is loyal to our government." How can that be? Wiesler wonders. Dreyman is good-looking, successful, with a beautiful lover; he must be getting away with something. Driven by suspicion, or perhaps by envy or simple curiosity, Wiesler has Dreyman's flat wired and begins an official eavesdropping inquiry.
He doesn't find a shred of evidence that Dreyman is disloyal. Not even in whispers. Not even in guarded allusions. Not even during pillow talk. The man obviously believes in the East German version of socialism, and the implication is that not even the Stasi can believe that. They are looking for dissent and subversion because, in a way, they think a man like Dreyman should be guilty of them. Perhaps they do not believe in East Germany themselves, but have simply chosen to play for the winning team.
Wiesler is a fascinating character. His face is a mask, trained by his life to reflect no emotion. Sometimes not even his eyes move. As played in Muehe's performance of infinite subtlety, he watches Dreyman as a cat awaits a mouse. And he begins to internalize their lives -- easy, because he has no life of his own, no lover, no hobby, no distraction from his single-minded job.
Although the movie won the best foreign-language film Oscar of 2006, you may not have seen it, so I will repress certain developments. I will say that Wiesler arrives at a choice, when his piggish superior officer, the government minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), develops a lust for Christa-Maria and orders Wiesler to pin something, anything, on Dreyman so that his rival will be eliminated. But there is nothing to pin on him. A loyal spy must be true to his trade, and now Wiesler is asked to be false to prove his loyalty.
The thing is, Wiesler has no one he can really talk to. He lives in a world of such paranoia that the slightest slip can be disastrous. Consider a scene in the Stasi cafeteria when a young officer unwisely cracks an anti-government joke; Wiesler goes through the motions of laughter, and then coldly asks for the man's name. The same could happen to Wiesler. So as he proceeds through his crisis, he has no one to confide in, and there is no interior monologue to inform us of his thoughts. There is only that blank face, and the smallest indications of what he might be thinking. And then instinctive decisions that choose his course for him.
The Berlin Wall falls in 1989 (the event is seen here), and the story continues for few more years to an ironic and surprisingly satisfactory conclusion. But the movie is relevant today, as our government ignores habeas corpus, practices secret torture, and asks for the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on its citizens. Such tactics did not save East Germany; they destroyed it, by making it a country its most loyal citizens could no longer believe in. Driven by the specter of aggression from without, it countered it with aggression from within, as sort of an anti-toxin. Fearing that its citizens were disloyal, it inspired them to be. True, its enemies were real. But the West never dropped the bomb, and East Germany and the other Soviet republics imploded after essentially bombing themselves.
"The Lives of Others" is a powerful but quiet film, constructed of hidden thoughts and secret desires. It begins with Wiesler teaching a class in the theory and practice of interrogation; one chilling detail is that suspects are forced to sit on their hands, so that the chair cushion can be saved for possible use by bloodhounds. It shows how the Wall finally fell, not with a bang, but because of whispers.

Max Manus

The eponymous hero of Max Manus was one of the more notable Norwegian resistance fighters in World War II, operating out of Oslo. After the fighting stopped he survived quietly in business until 1996. He's a figure undoubtedly still generating national pride, perhaps explaining the high praise accorded the movie from local sources. That's not to say this is a bad film by any means, but ultimately Manus' biographical wartime experiences, at least as translated to screen here, play out as something of a Boy's Own adventure, rather than a ruthlessly honest warts-and-all biopic despite the hero's final drunken introspection and occasional doubts. It's a film where the participant's have-a-go attitude and laddish enthusiasm for adventure keeps the action flowing smoothly from one escapade to another, with courage under duress, noble sacrifices, love interest and final victory almost a given.

As a portrait of continental wartime resistance shown through the increasing travails and vicissitudes of a group it belongs in the same category as the recent Female Agents (aka: Les Femmes des Ombres, 2008), Verhoeven's Black Book (aka: Zwartboek, 2006), or further back, the Dutch director's Soldier Of Orange (aka: Soldaat van Oranje, 1977). Incidentally, the latter also includes a scene where the hero meets royalty as a moment of great pride, but in place of Manus' relatively black and white view of events it offers a narrative altogether more complex and ironic, a world where loyalties are far more confused. Soldier Of Orange and Black Book both show both good and traitorous amongst the occupied - characters perhaps engendered by Verhoeven's presence as a child during the troubled times it represents. Even The Heroes Of Telemark (1965), Anthony Mann's snowbound film about the Norwegian resistance, featured a traitor or two as well as emphasising the painful, but necessary sacrifice of civilians. Those behind Max Manus are from a different generation presumably with no imperative to draw out such contradictory truths, although danger still lurks everywhere.

Of course a dose of revisionism is not the only way to make a good war film. One of the more interesting things about Max Manus is that it sandwiches the main action, set amongst the Norwegian resistance, between scenes of the hero fighting earlier as a soldier - one action in particular, a short, bloody encounter fought out in 1940 against the Soviets, before he was fighting back in Oslo. Perhaps intended to contrast the 'clean', if nervously exhausting, war on the front with the shadowy deceptions and suspense necessary elsewhere in Manus' career, these moments also serve to remind us of the type of the hero Manus was, in his own way, before fighting the Nazi occupation back at home. This is useful as, when we first see Manus in action away from such brutal certitudes of combat, his actions against the occupying forces are almost amateurish - initially working on an underground newspaper, posting flyers and plotting ludicrous assassination attempts - all with little professionalism, a fact noted by more experienced resistance fighters. Gradually however he makes his mark, notably with one daring escape from a hotel window for which he gains a small, slightly humorous reputation.

Using an escape route via Sweden, he find himself in Scotland, part of the first Norwegian volunteer force of saboteurs, being given his first assignment, now better trained and equipped when sent back home on assignment. Norway is now occupied, run by a puppet government, and something has to be done. Soon our hero is blowing up ships in Oslo harbour with limpet mines, dodging the efforts of the determinedly adversarial local Nazi Gestapo commander Fehmer (an intense performance by Ken Duken, incidentally, which at times reminds one by Ray Liotta) in locating him, as well as resolving some growing romantic issues of his own. In contrast to the earlier combat scenes it's noticeable that Manus is now more assured and calm as a fighter; in one notable moment, which might have escaped from a James Bond movie, he fires backwards at his enemies with a machine gun while escaping on a motorbike. Elsewhere the action and suspense are more convincing - including a moment when the hero accidentally shoots himself - presumably staged around documented true events. The hero's chief romantic interest is 'Tikken' Lindebraekke (Agnes Kittelsen), the resistance contact at the British embassy in Stockholm, but here emotions remain somewhat enigmatic and, to its credit, the film avoids any stereotypical resolution to their mounting tension.

Max Manus is staged with a confidence and with assured flow by its co-directors, and this, the most expensive Norwegian production to date is highly engaging. Adding considerably to this is the performance by Aksel Hennie as the hero; Hennie makes of him a very likable character, with convincing weaknesses and belief in his own mortality - a trait considerably humanising what could easily just become a nationalistic action figure. Towards the close of the movie, peace newly restored, this introspection comes to the fore as the surviving hero ponders his own moral culpability - even if the smile breaking out at the end of Max Manus for this viewer at least is less complex by way of implication than that which concludes, say, Once Upon A Time In America.