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"Gripping", "a masterpiece" and "the best film of the year" - just some of the superlatives that have been showered on The Lives of Others, the film that yanked the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar from under the nose of Pan's Labyrinth. It is set in East Germany in 1984, when secret surveillance teams kept tabs on much of the country's population, and focuses on one such covert operation. Ulrich Mühe is Wiesler, the secret service agent ordered to spy on the home of popular, and government-approved, playwright Georg Dreyman (Black Book's Sebastian Koch). The performances are very understated but believable. Wiesler is even more emotionally stunted than Matt Damon's somewhat comparable character in The Good Shepherd, but while his face remains expressionless throughout, Mühe cleverly uses his eyes betray his inner thoughts. In terms of visuals, debutant director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck effectively evokes the drab existence of life behind the iron curtain by filling the screen with greys, browns and greens.
All of which sounds like it should make for an excellent, tense thriller, but it was ultimately for me a sizeable disappointment. The main problem was that the pace slowed to a crawl for much of the first two acts, and when a film is 137 minutes long it needs to work to sustain interest. Things pick up in the last half hour or so when some tense situations arise, but there was disappointingly little suspense for much of the duration. It seemed that when suspense was called for, the same music track was just recycled over and over again, which worked a couple of times but then started to feel like blatant signposting. I quite liked the end, although it felt like it was going to finish about four times, before jumping forward in time to yet another epilogue scene. There are plenty of pluses - a fairly prevalent streak of humour was a pleasant surprise with such potentially grim material - but my attention was allowed to wander far too much. My expectations had perhaps been raised too high by reading such glowing reviews from all quarters, but if a film really is a masterpiece then surely no level of expectation should lead to disappointment.
The summary
The Lives of Others is quite gripping in the latter stages but it takes some time to get there. It's a slow-burn thriller with the emphasis on the slow rather than the thrills.
