THE LIVES OF OTHERS

What’s the recipe for movie success, and why's it so elusive – and I don’t just mean financially but critically and, well, artistically? Ocean’s Eleven (2001) was a big success, a box-office smash, a film people admired. The not-too-dissimilar Ocean’s Twelve (2004) was not. The Lives of Others is a runaway success. It won Best Film at the European Film Awards last year. It won Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, beating the hotly-fancied Volver among others. It played in Athens, so I’m told, for over three months at the same theatre. People who only watch two films a year at the cinema watched this one. Everyone agrees it’s ‘European cinema at its best’ – humane, serious-minded, deeply moving.

I’m not so sure. In fact, Lives of Others seems long-drawn-out and oddly simplistic – leading me to wonder if maybe that's the real reason for its success. Cloaked in seriousness, this is a film anyone can follow, even while reassuring themselves that they're watching something sober and Important. Many of the film's reviews mention how scrupulously it was researched, as if verisimilitude and truth were one and the same.

Lives is actually a Quasimodo story – the tale of the monster who loves the damsel from afar, and secretly helps her without getting credit – given a political twist. The monster (played by Ulrich Muhe) isn’t unsightly, like Quasimodo himself; he’s not an outsider or a tramp, as when Chaplin played a riff on this plot in City Lights; no, he’s a monster because of his job – an agent with the Stasi, East Germany’s secret surveillance police, spying on ordinary citizens deemed ‘enemies of the State’ by his superiors. Those superiors are porcine and repellent, a fat sleazy Minister and a petty, careerist Director – which of course is as it should be, because we all know the Stasi was evil. In fact, Lives of Others works best when you start with the assumption that Muhe’s character works for the Stasi, ergo Muhe’s character must be evil. That way you can be surprised by his finer feeling, gripped by his increasing identification with his latest subjects – a theatre director and his girlfriend – and finally moved by his personal sacrifice.

Of course, there’s no reason why a government spy should be evil; we’ve all read enough John le Carré to know they tend to operate rather from a complex conjunction of human flaws and insecurities. Nor, in fact, is it so surprising that a really good spy should be something of an artist – what is Art, if not an obsessive interest in other people? – making him identify when he has to spy on a fellow artist (especially when he also falls in love with that artist’s companion). The film spends a lot of needless energy trying to make him sympathetic; an assignation with a hooker reveals his loneliness, an encounter with a little boy in a lift shows an inchoate guilt for what he does. He’s shown reading Brecht. And meanwhile the landscape around him – filmed in chilly greys, browns and yellows – oozes oppression.

There are fine moments, in familiar Orwellian vein. The rules for interrogating suspects teem with irrational Catch-22s. If a suspect breaks down and cries, that means he must be guilty; if he insists they’ve got the wrong man, he can be arrested for doubting the government! Muhe’s face (he doesn’t talk much) is an eloquent palimpsest of professional chilliness over hidden yearnings. A scene involving a Honecker joke – a junior spy inadvertently insulting the Party Secretary in front of his superior – shows how fickle arbitrary power can be, and how terrifying.

Is that really so surprising, though? Is it even all that interesting? Totalitarian states are liable to repress; it’s what they do. Besides, can we really tut our self-righteous tut at the evil Stasi when our own democracies are stocking up on CCTV cameras (for “security” reasons, a reminder that the Stasi’s full name was the Ministry of State Security)? Is it more frightening that a Communist state in the 80s spied on dissident artists with long-distance microphones, or that a DNA database will someday be established – sooner rather than later, I suspect – allowing the State to monitor all citizens at will? Don’t get me wrong; both those things are equally distasteful. But The Lives of Others is short on pathos and long on complacency, based on easy truisms and easy assumptions. In fact, I sometimes wonder if this long, portentous film – for all its runaway success – is really saying anything deeper than (for instance) Die Hard 4.0. Heresy!