The Lives of Others proves worthy foreign film

The Academy's choice for Best Foreign Language Film this year was the German entry, The Lives of Others. And while The Lives of Others is by no means a poor film, it simply radiates blandness and a certain lack of visual language which is particularly disappointing for a film with a premise that presents so much promise.

Set in East Germany in the early 1980s, The Lives of Others follows a highly skilled prisoner interrogator, Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), for the East German Communist Regime, which, utilizing their infamous Stasi, have placed many East German citizens, including many prominent artists, under surveillance to root out any Western sympathizers.

Wiesler is assigned to survey a suspected playwright and to report on his dealings through the use of phone taps and wires implanted in the walls. Yet his rigorous obedience to the Regime is soon tested as he discovers corruption within his own ranks and develops his own growing sympathy for the playwright and his wife.

What makes this a somewhat disappointing film is its squandering of a very obvious opportunity.

Most of the film is spent with Mühe spying on the couple from a nearby building, with headphones on and a typewriter at his fingertips recording the happenings, but the lack of his visual experience is missing. Whenever you have a film about a spy, especially as the protagonist, the filmmaker has the opportunity to explore someone else's world through a characterized onlooker.

Debut director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn't choose to explore this more interesting approach and instead chooses to fix his attention on plot.

And while the plot is engrossing and the pacing is done well, he wastes the opportunity to use the eye of the camera as a first person eye, as a surveillance camera eye or even, and perhaps more interestingly, as a study in the limitations to that visual positioning.

Indeed, Mühe begins to live vicariously through the couple (i.e. having sex after hearing the couple have sex), yet the film barely scratches the surface of what Mühe misses in this translation. Their contentment cannot be converted to him, but he remains affixed to their experiences anyway.

Mühe speaks very little but observes very stringently, providing a model protagonist to inhabit the camera eye with. But alas, this aspect goes unfulfilled.

Accordingly, the best shots of the film are with Mühe in his chair at his soundboard and typewriter as the low-set camera glides around his chair. Just a little vision of his solitary existence.

What you need here is Brian de Palma-plain and simple.

He is the director needed to seize this kind of opportunity, and if you need justification, go watch Snake Eyes with Nicolas Cage and watch the way that de Palma explores the many uses of the camera eye (and he, in turn, built mainly off of Orson Welles' spatial explorations).

While the plot and mechanics of The Lives of Others make it worth seeing, it's disappointing to see a potentially great film find its way into mediocre territory.

Volver, directed by Pedro Almodóvar, was a much better foreign language film (great actually, foreign or no) this past year, so after dabbling in The Lives of Others, I would suggest taking a closer look at that as well.