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Buy it on Amazon.
The best serious film I saw in the last year is “Never Look Away,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s study of a boy in Nazi Germany who grows up to become a painter in East Germany. Three hours long. In German. I saw it with an audience; rapt silence, followed by great applause. I encourage you to find the time. For the trailer, click here. Do NOT stream it on Amazon — it has no subtitles.
In 2007, another film by von Donnersmarck won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It is about love and loyalty and art — some of the same subjects as “Never Look Away” — but it sets those themes against a thrilling story of surveillance. Not like the surveillance we know: the capturing of our personal data by Facebook, Amazon, and Google, and other data, very likely gleaned from our email and every other keystroke, by the government. Here there are actual agents and stooges: In East Germany in the 1980s, the Stasi — the secret police — had 90,000 employees and 173,000 informers. In a country of 16 million people, that’s huge; it means that one of every 63 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi.
What does spying do to the people who do it?
That’s the question Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck asks in “The Lives of Others.” And he asks it in the simplest possible way. Georg Dreyman is a successful playwright, and not just in the theater. He’s respected by his peers and tolerated by the government: “the only non-subversive writer we have.” He lives with an actress, a great beauty who has the misfortune to come to the attention of a government official. He knows he couldn’t seduce her on the strength of his own charm — but what if he got Georg Dreyman out of the way?
Problem: there’s no dirt on Dreyman.
But in the down-is-up world of dictatorships, that only proves he’s guilty of…. something. And so, in the way that officials use their power for personal gain, the Stasi assigns Capt. Gerd Wiesler to eavesdrop on Dreyman. The result is as exciting as Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” [To buy the DVD from Amazon, click here. To rent or buy the streaming video and watch the film now, click here.]
Dreyman is a good man. As is Weisler. And the more Wesler learns about Dreyman, the more he admires him. But that, of course, is not what his assignment is about.
We may think of oppressive regimes as soul killers that strip choices from the lives of their people. That is how many Germans explain their conduct during the Nazi decades. But that’s not true. We have choices, all of us, each and every minute. And that is what makes this thrilling movie so powerful — we see the effect of his nasty work on Weisler. And how his concerns deepen as Dreyman undertakes some forbidden writing.
In “The Firm,” the greatest thrills occurred at a Xerox machine. In “The Lives of Others,” a typewriter is as dangerous as a gun. And now? It’s everywhere. Increasingly, the only true freedom you have is in your head. And there it’s an old story: Nothing is more dangerous than an idea.
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This article originally appeared on The Head Butler.
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