Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Breathtaking, heartfelt and in-the-end deeply moving film which leaves you with a profound sense of hope for humanity

Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Cast: Ulrich Mühe (Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler), Sebastian Koch (Georg Dreyman), Martina Gedeck (Christa-Maria Sieland), Ulrich Tukur (Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz), Thomas Thieme (Minister Bruno Hempf), Hans-Uwe Bauer (Paul Hauser), Volkmar Kleinert (Albert Jerska), Matthias Brenner (Karl Wallner), Herbert Knaup (Gregor Hessenstein), Charly Hübner (Udo Leveh)

For almost half the twentieth century, Germany was a country divided. West Germany was a world we might recognise today. East Germany was one George Orwell would have found eerily familiar, a surveillance state, where neighbour reported on neighbour, conversations and opinions were monitored and controlled, and the Stasi had ultimate power. Everything was designed to undermine personal loyalty, introduce mistrust into every relationship and keep in power apparatchiks who enjoyed privileges beyond the imagination of others. But what happens when humanity comes up against this system? Can the lives of others affect what the system’s agents think and feel?

1985, East Berlin. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is the perfect cog in the Stasi machine. Emotion isn’t an issue when he interrogates dissidents for hours at a time, or sits overnight listening to every word spoken in a suspect’s bugged house. All that starts to change when Wiesler is ordered to carry out an operation against noted playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Dreyman appears to be the perfect citizen, but is suspected of dissident sympathies. More dangerously for him, he’s having a relationship with famed actor Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) who has attracted the lascivious attentions of the corpulent and corrupt Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme). As Wiesler listens to Dreyman and Sieland’s lives, he finds himself deeply affected by exposure to art he has never experienced and begin to question the certainties of his world-view.

The Lives of Others is a moving, humane debut from von Donnersmarck, offering a rich and chilling insight into the horror of living in a country where thoughts are not free and words are strictly monitored. It carries such emotional impact because it gives us hope that, no matter the strictures of the world around us, common humanity and decency can break through and change us – even the most mechanical servants of a regime. The Lives of Others does this with realism and a lack of sentiment, showing life and the after-effects of our decisions in non-romantic detail, while also giving us hope that goodness can shine through no matter the cost.

Shot in a series of cold colours reflecting the featureless surroundings of East Germany, The Lives of Others exposes the beige hopelessness of Soviet life. It opens with Weisler’s long interrogation of “Prisoner 227”, cutting between it and a lecture hall, where Weisler plays tapes of it to teach a class. He shows no emotion of any type in either setting for the distressed, exhausted prisoner he’s talking to, and matter-of-factly marks down the name of a student who questions the ethics of what he’s doing. Weisler’s life is one of quiet exactitude: his apartment is featureless, his meals are bland pasta with ketchup, he has no friends and barely seems able to smile.

He contrasts totally with Geog Dreymon. Played with an ebullient innocence by Sebastian Koch, Dreymon has accommodated himself with the regime’s requirements. Does he believe in socialism? It’s one of the film’s mysteries – Dreymon may have an intellectual romanticism but he’s averse to making pointless protests or stands that will only lead to him being silenced. He is willing to accept the shelving of his director friend, for his works to be pushed into a realist factory-setting by plodding directors. His charm sees him befriend the high and mighty (“it was a gift from Frau Honecker” he tells a Stasi officer who questions his possession of a Western book) and he has boyish innocence, like someone who has never known the Orwellian horrors he lives amidst.

His friends however have. His director friend Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) is an ‘unperson’ whose presence is an embarrassment at parties. Another is a closet radical who feels he should take a stance. Above all, Christa-Marie (a marvellous Martina Gedeck) lives with the abuse of Minister Thieme. This corrupt man – who orders Stasi investigations against people he doesn’t like and is the only character who looks overfed and well-dressed – fondles Christa-Marie at parties and forces her into sexual encounters in his chauffeured car. Corrupt men run this state – similarly Wiesler’s Stasi superior Grubitz (a wonderfully smug Ulrich Tukur), is interested only in promotion.

The system is propped up by men like Wiesler. But all that changes as listening to Dreymon’s life pulls something out of Wiesler he has never thought about before. What pivots this? Perhaps Wiesler truly listening to the warmth and vibrancy of Dreymon’s home life? Perhaps exposure to art? Von Donnersmarck masterfully shows (with complimentary camera moves between two locations) Wiesler teary, spellbound listening to Dreymon’s playing of a piano sonata. It opens up a new world of artistic and cultural understanding to Wiesler, who is drawn to the books in Dreymon’s apartment and begins turning more than a blind eye to Dreymon’s flirtation with dissidents.

In fact, Wiesler morphs from Dreymon’s dark shadow to his protective guardian angel. He awakens in himself a care for people around him, from the son of a neighbour to Dreymon and Christa-Maria. He conceals Dreymon’s involvement in a scheme to smuggle someone across the border (tragically the plan is a fake, designed to test if Dreymon’s apartment is bugged). He does his best to reassure Christa-Maria, “bumping into her” anonymously to provide her a moment of solace with a stranger and subtle counselling on her relationship with Dreymon. As Dreymon carefully writes an article, to be smuggled to the West, critical of the regime, Wiesler fills his reports with imagined plot details and quotes for the Lenin play Dreymon claims to be writing.

Dreymon is actually writing an article about the suicide rate in East Germany. Suicide becomes a heart-wrenching central theme. An oppressive, domineering regime like East Germany offers only one real escape: death. A state designed to make its own people suspect and turn on each other is designed to grind you into a choice between blank conformism or taking your own life. And we see the effects of this on multiple characters, as people are separated from the things that give their life meaning, stripped of their own identity, or made to betray those they love. For some, this is more than they can bear.

In this world, just displaying humanity is the victory. Ulrich Mühe’s breath-taking performance slowly fills with growing doubts, longings and passions under the surface of an impassive, quiet man who suddenly realises the world is larger and more magical than he ever imagined. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, he starts burrowing in the bowels of Stasi HQ, his eyes fixed only on what is in front of him. The film’s victory is turning this man into one who makes huge, unrewarded, sacrifices to protect another, the very attitude he quietly deconstructed in the film’s opening. Mühe is superb, the film constantly exploring his face for unspoken depths.

von Donnersmarck’s film ends with an extended coda of life after reunification. Some things are not as triumphant as hoped: Wiesler lives in poverty, the streets are lined with graffiti and tramps, cockroaches like Thieme remain in authority. But it is also a place where hope and friendship are possible, where things can be spoken rather than suppressed. It culminates in the sort of free-publishing Dreymon could never dream of and a tribute that could never have been spoken before.

After the crushing misery and suicidal pressures of the East, a world of possibility and freedom is one where we all could change our stars like Wiesler, to find an inner contentment from doing the right thing for no reward. Brilliantly filmed and deeply moving, The Lives of Others is a masterpiece.

Tom Schilling excels in this shadowy Gerhard Richter biography Never Look Away

Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Cast: Tom Schilling (Kurt Barnet), Sebastian Koch (Professor Carl Seeband), Paula Beer (Ellie Seeband), Saskia Rosendahl (Elisabeth May), Oliver Masucci (Professor Antonius van Verten), Ina Weisse (Martha Seeband), Rainer Bock (Dr Burghart Kroll), Hanno Koffler (Gunther Presueer)

In 2006 The Lives of Others propelled Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck to the fore-front of the European Arts Film circle. His follow-up, the Depp/Jolie starrer The Tourist was a disaster that sent him spiralling back. Now von Donnersmarck returns to German cinema – and the travails and divides of a country split for a large chunk of the 20^thcentury into East and West – with Never Look Away a film heavily inspired by the life and work of famed German artist Gerhard Richter, with splashes of German history and it’s difficult relationship with both fascism and socialism.

Kurt Barnett is an artist growing up in Nazi Germany, living outside Dresden after his father lost his teaching job due to his reluctance to join the party. Barnett’s family is hit hard during the way – his two young uncles are killed, Dresden (and everyone he knows) is destroyed. Worst of all his inspirational artistic sister Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) is diagnosed with schizophrenia and is quietly killed during the Nazi programme of removing “unsuitable elements” from German society. That decision is taken by Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a natural survivor and amoral egotist who later makes the adjustment smoothly to living in the Socialist East. Barnett (played by Tom Schilling as a young man) meanwhile goes to East German art school, falling in love with a fashion student Ellie (Paula Beer), but struggling to find his own voice in an East Germany where all art must serve a social purpose. Will escape to the West bring freedom of thought?

Never Look Away is a mantra in the film, in an epic quasi-biography that explores the dark underbelly of German history, filtering the countries struggles to find some sort of freedom through the world of Art. It also has an unflinching eye for the losses and horrors of Nazi Germany, with the film never turning away from the brutal impact of the bombings of Dresden, the death of Kurt’s uncles on the Eastern front and (toughest of all) the shuffling of his tragic aunt into a gas chamber.

But the film also works so well as a commentary on the silent repression Germany has suffered throughout the twentieth century, from the fear of stepping out of line with a contrary opinion in Nazi Germany, to the repression of individualist thought under Communist East Germany. “Never Look Away” are the last words Elisabeth speaks to Kurt – and it’s what fuels his eventual move towards Art that comments on reality with its blurred reproductions of personal snapshots and images (see Gerard Richter’s art).

Von Donnersmarck uses art as a neat commentary for these ideas by showing how, in each era of Germany, the comments and views of art reflect each other. The film opens with the young Kurt and Elisabeth taking a tour around a Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Dresden, which suggests the likes of Picasso and Dali are either insane, moral degenerates, perverts or all three for their failure to create art that properly reflects nature. Later at the East German art school, the same artists are denounced again for failing to carry a proper and correct social message in their work. The tables are turned in the free Germany of the 1960s, where Modern exhibitionist art is all the rage, and paint and canvas is so passeas to be almost vulgar. Three different political spectrums, three very different dictates from society about what constitutes art.

How’s a man to find himself, and his personal expression as an artist, in the middle of this? Kurt is a gifted painter and drawer, but in every era his work is moved towards what is expected of him. As a boy in Germany he hides his impressionist sketches. In East Germany he becomes a famous painter of socialist images and murals. In the art college he tries to shift his style into the experimental alleyways of his peers – work that his professor (played with a neat mixture of pretension and earnestness by Oliver Masucci) recognises his not his true voice. It takes putting his own spin on images and memories of the past – of careful reproductions than subtly blurred to reflect our own imperfect memories (a visual trick von Donnersmarck prepares us for throughout the film with Barnett watching things move in and out of focus as they happen before him) works perfectly.

The film throws together this mix of art and German history with a thick streak of melodrama, which should be ridiculous but basically seems to work. Contrivance and coincidence bring together the fates of Barnett and Professor Seeband, the man responsible for the death of his aunt, and bounds their lives together forever. It’s a narrative development that could make you groan, but somehow the film gets away with it. It probably mostly works because Sebastian Koch is excellent as Seebold, even if the man is so base, selfish, lacking in shame and principle and coldly, uncaringly ruthless that he feels at time almost like a cartoon. No deed of greed and bastardy is beneath him, and the score frequently underlines his villiany with a series of unsubtle cues.

But it works because Koch’s Seebold is also a marvellous commentary on the flexibility of so many in Germany. Seamlessly he turns himself from proud SS sterilisation and termination doctor, into proud East German Socialist leader and finally into centre-piece of West German society as a leading surgeon. Just as art is bent and shifted, so Seebold represents how people will allow their lives and principles to adapt and shift with all the rest. It’s worth a bit of melodrama and some plot twists that lean on the unbelievable (and are based far less on reality than most of Richter’s life).

But the sections that focus on Barnet/Richter are just as fine, and von Donnersmarck brings energy, excitement and joy to the act of art creation in the way few other film makers have done. Tom Schilling continues his excellent run of roles, as a passionate free-thinker, yearning to have the chance to find his own voice and Paula Beer is just as good as his wife, whose artistic soul is just as strong, even if she does get a (albeit moving) can-I-have-babies plotline. The relationship between these two is striking for its loving affection and genuine warmth. And it gives the film a real heart.

Never Look Away isn’t perfect, but in its marvellous expression of the joys of artistic creation and the way that art is bent and used for the needs of government and society, it has a lot to say. With excellent performances across the board – Schilling, Koch and Beer are fabulous – it is also a fascinating commentary on the schizophrenic nature of Germany itself throughout much of the twentieth century. Melodramatic and obvious at times – and even I will say overlong at nearly three hours – a thudding mix at times of points made with too much force, it’s also a marvellous exploration of art and artists. Von Donnersmarck is back.