Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Le Vite Degli Altri

Every joke, book, fairy tale, and film, regardless of its objective goodness/pleasantness, can be encompassed by the accommodating image of a placid oily lake in the morning. It doesn't matter if it's the badass County of the Hobbits, the Star Trek spaceship, a Himalayan peak, the preparation for a war action, or a suburban apartment in Milan waking up. No matter how different the setting of the beginning may be, it always starts with a situation of balance that, with infinite nuances in terms of time and force, is shaken by the event capable of impregnating the story that we tell/are offered. It can be a gentle breeze, a whirlwind of a sudden storm, bloody and annoying English rain, a landslide, or it can be icy and raging buckets of water that ruffle the waves of the aforementioned lake. But sooner or later, the break, the story, arrives.

I love descriptive films that calmly linger on details and slowly photograph the surrounding environment; they manage to immerse me in it thanks to a funnel-like progression without forcing and with annoying and simplifying voiceovers. But this beautiful framework is just a mere starting point for a good film because the rupture, much more important, always looms around the corner. How many films have gone to waste or been diminished to the colorless adjective nice after the break?

"1984" IN THE G.D.R. 

The sickly sun can be glimpsed through the windows on a couple of sparse occasions, and it is no coincidence. The gray of the sky, the dark or dull colors of the clothes, and the black of the night prevail to give the viewer not only an idea but the sensation of an oppressive atmosphere, of suffocated freedom at every action in the mid-80s G.D.R. Dry dialogues devoid of a glimmer of irony mix with terror for the possible repercussions that every minute deviation from the ordinary could generate: the words used or written must be weighed to avoid being suspected and therefore imprisoned by the security and espionage organization of East Germany, a.k.a. STASI. It takes just a few minutes, and we understand we are inside a year, 1984, that very much resembles the "1984" we have all read. Only in such a context of repressed dissent and sequential suicides can we justify the protagonist taking on the appearance of an iceberg. It seems that on the protagonist's emotions: STASI captain Gerd Wiesler, the Roman army has passed after the third Punic war and has poured tons of salt on it so that nothing cursed grows anymore.

LIVES OF OTHERS 

For Wiesler (HGW XX/7), it seems like a task similar to a thousand others: only more important because it's received from a bit higher up than usual. However, observing the unsuspecting theater actor Dreyman and his beautiful companion is, as you have already understood, my sharp readers, the breath that slowly ripples the waves of the small lake. There are no flashbacks, and thus we are left to imagine that perhaps in the other countless lives he had intruded into, he had never stumbled upon that new sensation, a mix of envy, understanding, and compassion. It's a gentle wind, but constant.

He studies and pities the writer in crisis, oppressed by having to write with the handbrake perpetually pulled and uncertain about his future. The silent spy yearns for Dreyman's companion, Christa, who, to express her prowess on stage, pays every Thursday's carnal and disgusting price: she tries in vain to wash it away with soap, tears, and pills. Mühe, with that suit in depressing harmony with the aridity of the Captain he embodies, proves to be a giant (and for this, I believe we will miss him very much) in representing this policeman's figure. In many cases in cinema, enigmatic, deep, and magnetic characters well structured in the introduction phase are extreme and distorted in the second half.

HGW XX/7 instead maintains its façade of glacial meticulous routine while unsuccessfully trying to forcefully suppress the change happening in his shaken personality by that new assignment. He is confronted with the total contrast between his non-life and Dreyman's. An empty existence well expressed by a sad tomato sauce squeezed from a tube that barely colors pasta eaten alone in a bare apartment; an existence that mirrors the scheduled shagging on the couch with the party's prostitute/matron. Wiesler feeds on the couple's passion while listening from the attic and typing out their life which, within the context's limits, is so full and rich it seems like a mirage compared to his. He listens with headphones to the penetrating notes of the sonata of the good man, and a wrinkle of doubt forms on his glassy face. Of silent and repressed rebellion.

The 3 crisis-ridden protagonists' lives are thus intertwined, amidst the bugs in the drywall, up to the final laden with pathos worthy of closing a work of undoubted quality that I recommend to you.