Das Leben der Anderen

Spent the weekend sleeping and sleeping some more, then as a grand finale watched "The Lives of Others" which has been sitting lonely in its Netflix envelope for I don't know how many months. When one out of three roommates has already seen it, you cut the viewership down to two, and when those two are so rarely in the house together as to seem like magnets of the same charge, you NEVER get to watch the movie.

(I don't know whether to blame the awkward metaphor on all the sleeping or on the Germanness of the film.)

I really, really enjoyed the movie. It took the predictable cast of rebellious artists under the socialist German Democratic Republic, corrupt officials and one standard-issue Chief Interrogator of Impeccable Record and made it worth watching. The review I'd read of the film initially said that the Chief Interrogator of Impeccable Record (CIIR...or H. G. Wiesler, actually, played by Ulrich Muhe and you need to add your own umlaut above the u) became obsessed and in love with the actress who is the playwright's girlfriend and muse. I felt instead that this was a pretty flat description, that in reality Wiesler falls into platonic love with both the playwright and the actress, seeing in them the human dignity that was betrayed by the corruption with in the GDR's socialist government. The movie is tense and full of fraught relationships, a lot of those miscommunications or communications which arrive too late that always result in disaster, but it is not without an uplifting Fanfare for the Common Man kind of ending. Okay, maybe not quite Fanfare but maybe something a little quieter, like a Sonata for a Good Man.