Guest Author - Holly Fox

Go Germany!

What wasn’t quite possible during the World Cup finally came true last night at the Oscars. While soccer fans and film fans might not be the same audience, it’s no question that the cast and creators of The Lives of Others have made Germany proud.

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, the directorial debut of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was up against four other foreign language films first narrowed down from a list of sixty-seven, and then from a shorter list of nine. Each country is able to officially submit one of their own films and ultimately the five nominees are chosen by a special panel of Academy Members. The Lives of Others made the first cut, then the second cut, and last night won the little bald man for Germany.

If an Oscar isn’t enough recommendation for you, I can only say that this was the best movie I saw last year (and I saw The Departed) and could be the best movie you see this year. It opened in Los Angeles and New York the weekend of February the 9th and earned $277,000, the highest figure for any German export thus far, and as they say, “is coming soon to a theater near you.” Look for it the first weekend of March.

A woman I know who works in the German film industry, says Americans only like German movies that have to do with World War II. I think with the success of movies like Goodbye Lenin! and now The Lives of Others, we can say that Americans also like German movies that have to do with the GDR. The film portrays Georg Dreymann, a playwright (Sebastian Koch), and Christa-Maria Sieland, his actress companion (Martina Gedeck), their circle of artist friends, and the system that is spying on them in East Berlin. This system is represented by Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe) who listens daily to their passions and their troubles through the wires leading from their apartment to his post in their attic. Under the undetected pressure of the surveillance, their lives begin to spin out of control. Although the contrast between the rich lives of the artist couple and the emptiness of the spy’s life could have been tritely handled, each actor fills his or her role with such intensity that the film is exquisitely painful, a love story between a man and a woman, and between a spy and the lives of others.