THE LOVE OF DETAILS. The Lives of Others, which is the first film
written by German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck,
demonstrates an exquisite love of details, which requires the constant
attention of the spectator, in a film in which a psychological thriller
predominates the action. Something rather logical, of course, given
that we are talking about a German film. In fact, the first sequence
of the film already gives tiny details in order to show us the
perfection of the protagonist, Gerd Wiesler, a high official, and
efficient officer of the Stasi, the German secret service in the
Communist regime before the fall of the Berlin Wall, who carefully
analyzes political prisoners in order to detect when they lie without
the use of a polygraph, but subjects them to psychological torture.
And it is this skillful scene and the detail that the
captain marks
small cross on the desk of one of his students, who is aspiring to be
an officer, that publicly demonstrates his weakness and puts the
methods that the captain employs to obtain information into doubt.In
The Lives of Others there is no capacity for weakness and the
protagonists is its maximum exponent: cold, calculating, and without
emotions. Nevertheless, with elegance and with progressive form, the
director is showing us how the inflexibility of the protagonist is
moving towards his humanity which culminates in the final scene of the
film, which I will not recount, of course. But as the film
demonstrates this transformation that the captain is experimenting
with, as a result of spying on a writer and sees the miseries of the
regime, which is emphasized in a scene in which the captain meets a
little boy in the elevator of his building, who innocently tell the
captain that his father says all the police are bad people, and when
the captain takes out his notebook and is going to ask the boy what his
father''s name is, so he can blacklist him...he finally remains doubtful
and lets the boy leave without interrogating him.The Lives of Others
won the Oscar in 2006 for Best Foreign Film, which could be another
incentive to see it. But I would recommend seeing this movie as a
demonstration of how weakness enlarges a person, instead of shrinking
them; about how a dramatic story can be told without melodrama, and
about how a film can come to capture the heart of a person. And this
movie as well as history tell us not to be indifferent toward what we
see.