I watched yesterday Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others.” One of the main reasons I wanted to see the film was the following paragraph from Anthony Lane’s eloquent review:

One of the marvels of Ulrich Mühe’s performance—in its seething stillness, its quality not just of self-denial but of self-haunting—is that he never distills Wiesler into a creature purely of his times. You can imagine him, with his close-cropped hair, as a young Lutheran in the wildfire of the early Reformation, or as a lost soul finding a new cause in the Berlin of 1933. See him crouched in a loft above Dreyman’s home with a typewriter, a tape deck, and headphones clamped to his skull. Watch the nothingness on his face as he taps out his report on the couple’s actions: “Presumably have intercourse.” How long can you listen to love being made? Especially when your only love comes from a hooker who marches in, performs, then leaves before you have even refastened your pants? Slowly, the tables turn. Wiesler steals Dreyman’s copy of Brecht and takes it home to read; he starts to omit details in his official account; and, for some fathomless reason—guilt, curiosity, longing—he lets the lives of others run their course.

If you’re even half a writer, wouldn’t you want to believe that writing can set us free? The film was absorbing. But it turned out to be more convincing in the moments when it tried to present terror (the opening lecture by Stasi man, for example) than when it sought to inspire hope (the closing moments when interceptor of mail has become a simple mailman and an accidental reader). And today, thanks to Robin Varghese, I found an article by Slavoj Zizek about the film, provocatively arguing that the real plot of the film is a homosexual romance. Maybe. I found more resonant this passage from the Zizek text:

To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: “Good Bye Hitler” instead of “Good Bye Lenin.” Doesn’t this bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential in Communism, which, distorted and thwarted as it was, was thoroughly missing in Fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany toward the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a Lenin-statue carried by the helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may appear.