Redemptive Pattern

Cast: Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Muehe

Rating:

Running at: Inox City Centre,

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Sometimes, cinema ends up being redemptive. It delivers audience from the overwhelming brutality of history. Through instances of kindness, like in Schindler8217;s List and The Pianist, which talked about amazing survivor tales during the Nazi regime, it humanizes harrowing experiences. The 2006 Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others, which finds a rather late release in Kolkata halls, explores similar territories but its narrative is styled more as a psychological thriller, where characters and not their immediate history, shape the proceedings.

It8217;s East Germany in the mid 1980s, where the oppressive Stasi police rounds up hapless youngsters suspected of helping friends escape to the more liberal West Germany. Fear lurks in every corner, freedom of expression is limited to secret societies of subversive writers who smuggle their works out to the west. In such a world, Georg Dreyman Sebastian Koch, is a smug, successful writer, who hides his ideals behind the psychophanitc relationship with the government. He seems to have found a perfect balance 8212; he refrains from making direct attacks at the regime in public and the Stasi keeps out of his business. Almost. His passionate affair with a temptuos stage actor, Christa-Maria Sieland Martina Gedeck, invites the wrath of a senior Stasi official, who is conducting an exploitative affair with her too. A spy is quickly deployed by the government, who with a team of specialists bugs Dreyman8217;s house. The surveilence officer in charge of the case, Gerd Wiesler Ulrich Muehe is a cold-blooded monster. He leads a life of a zombie, walking to a bare apartment every night and feeding on the fear of the victims he grills. But light comes to his life in the form of Dreyman8217;s idealism. As he monitors the writer8217;s life, he slowly succumbs to his convictions. He buys their dream of a free world. Ironically, the victims are struggling with their own demons8212;Dreyman is torn between his life of comfort and the perilous path of his beliefs while Christa is tired of making compromises in her career.

Henckel von Donnersmarck8217;s triumph as a director lies not in the fact that he manages to convince us about Wiesler8217;s transformation, but in the way in which petty incidents have walloping consequences in the film. Yet, the ironies are as delicately layered and delicious as they could possibly be without a hint of preciosity.

Incidentally, in India, which seems to be in a grip of voyeuristic reality television shows, the release of The Lives of Others, couldn8217;t have been better timed. It illustrates in the most potent way, the happy consequences of voyeurism.