Moral dilemmas dominate 'The Lives of Others'

Someone once credited those who governed Cold War East Germany with combining the arrogance of Nazism with the paranoia of Communism. Seeing "The Lives of Others," the winner of this year's best foreign language film Academy Award, makes such a damning conclusion almost feel understated. But there's another "ism" that also comes to mind -- an absurdism that makes the novels of Franz Kafka feel like nonfiction.

Set in 1984, "Lives" tells the story of Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), an intelligence officer with the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (the Ministry for State Security), commonly called the Stasi. He is assigned to set up surveillance on a talented playwright whom a colleague describes as the only writer in the Republic above suspicion, completely loyal to the Socialist cause. That alone, according to Gerd's ambitious immediate superior, Lt. Col. Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), puts him under suspicion.

So, with the timed precision of a drably dressed "Mission: Impossible" team, Gerd and his men wire the phone and put microphones in every room of the book-strewn apartment that the handsome and urbane Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) shares with actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), the lead in Dreyman's party-approved play. He then installs recording equipment in an attic of Dreyman's building.

Gerd hears or sees nothing to indicate Dreyman is anything different than what he appears to be, but Sieland has a secret. The talented but insecure actress is seeing another man, and it proves easy for Gerd to find out who: Her suitor is the boorish Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), a party official who is Gerd's boss's boss. Christa-Maria is reluctantly allowing him to paw her in the back seats of chauffeured state cars not only to preserve her own career, but also that of Dreyman.

With this, "The Lives of Others" writer and director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, poses his film's interlocking moral dilemmas. Gerd's solitary, loveless, bureaucrat's life is the antithesis of the one lived by Dreyman, an artist and intellectual with a sexy and beautiful girlfriend and faithful friends. But he is certain to jeopardize his own career if he reports the truth about what is going on in the apartment below. Few would deny that "The Lives of Others" is true to its self, and in its depiction of human nature -- and human spirit.