Popcorn #2: The Lives of Others + Half Nelson

Wiesler listens in.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS – now showing Nova, Como, Brighton Bay, Kino & Rivoli

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, The Lives of Others, won best foreign film at this year’s Oscars. In doing so, it pulled the (red) carpet out from under the feet of the much lauded and loved Pan’s Labyrinth. But the German film’s win was well-deserved – it’s superb.

The Lives of Others plays out in East Germany in the early 1980s. The East German regime and its secret police, the Stasi, exercise iron control over the country. The Stasi are so powerful and all-pervasive that anyone – girlfriend, neighbour, or colleague – could be a police informer. In this society, which is corrupted by fear, distrust, and graft, writer Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) enjoys the rare privilege of being both a fine writer and a favourite of the East German state. Dreyman’s a good man, but complacent, self-interestedly blind to the corrosive power of the state. Only the plight of a friend and fellow artist persecuted by the system rouses him into dissent.

What Dreyman doesn’t know is that he’s a romantic obstacle to a powerful Party official, and is already the object of Stasi surveillance. Every part of Dreyman’s life is being recorded, documented, and observed. Deftly, the film sketches the character of Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), the Stasi officer in charge of digging up dirt to use against Dreyman. Wiesler’s a man of inhuman self-possession. Everything about him is controlled, meticulous, and buttoned-up – his apartment is so impersonally neat it looks like a motel; and he has a hooker, not a wife or girlfriend. It seems that after years of stealing other people’s secrets, Wiesler has protected himself from similar theft by ceasing to live a life worthy of secrets.

Like a documentary-maker, Wiesler’s job is to observe Dreyman’s life, not intervene in it. But in a storyline that recalls Coppola’s The Conversation, Wiesler finds himself drawn into the lives he spies on. Dreyman and his girlfriend, Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), an acclaimed actress, brim with the risk, vitality, and messy emotions that Wiesler’s life lacks. Inevitably, the surveillance of the couple uncovers incriminating evidence – everyone’s fate turns on what Wiesler does with it.

The Lives of Others doesn’t so much weave the personal and political together, as show they were never separate to begin with. It ponders how much responsibility people have for their actions when trapped in a system larger than themselves. When does compromise become complicity? It also shows how people live through proxies, an idea, of course, that folds back on the viewer sitting in the dark watching The Lives of Others.

Despite this obvious intellect, the film’s ideas remain grounded in its characters. These characters will linger long after you’ve left the cinema, so exquisitely do director and cast bring them to life. These are lives worth living – even if only by proxy.

--Hans Fruck

Ryan Gosling.

HALF NELSON – opens April 25, wide release

Ryan Gosling turns in an extraordinarily vulnerable and finely nuanced performance in Half Nelson, a film that’s only weakness may be the staggeringly high expectations that precede it. Flooded with critical praise from its American release and flood-lit by Gosling’s 2007 Oscar nomination, Half Nelson reads as the greatest piece of indie cinema since Tarantino rocked the reservoir. Is it as earth-shattering, as nakedly humanistic, as ferociously honest, as the vast catalogue of critical sound-bites would have us believe? It is not. It is a small film, with limited aspirations, that achieves perfectly within its class. But if you understand this going in, you cannot possibly be disappointed.

Gosling plays Dan Dunne, an aspirational history teacher and basketball coach from an inner-city middle school, determined to make an impact on the lives of his students. Dunne lectures his young class on a philosophical perspective of historical change, seeking to affect not what they think but how they think, in the subtle mode of inspiring teachers everywhere. 13-year-old Drey (Shareeka Epps) is a self-protective latch-key kid with a quick mind and a broken family; just one of Dunne’s many sheltered charges, until the day she stumbles upon her beloved ‘Teach’ smoking crack in the girl’s locker room. As Dunne struggles to maintain a balance between the cynicism of his unpretentious addiction and the idealism of his working life, Drey explores the protected and privileged world of a drug mule. Between the two of them, there is a quiet and awful symmetry.

Shot verite style on handheld digital camera, Half Nelson is driven by close photography and shifting focus. Confronting but overwhelmingly intimate, the actors hold the thin threads of the plot together with the spare intensity of their work. 17-year-old Epps plays Drey with a steady gaze, unfazed by the quiet horrors of poverty and disadvantage – and in her first screen role delivers a performance worthy of actors twice her age and 20 years more experienced. But Gosling, first distinguished in The Believer (2001) and first detected in The Notebook (2004), comes fully of age with his heartbreaking interpretation of Dan Dunne. Stoic, romantic, bitter and broken, his character walks a careful edge between utter despair and blind faith, making an ordinary kind of tragedy in an ordinary kind of life seem as beautiful as it is wasteful.

--Simone Ubaldi