Ray Pride

It was only appropriate to confirm with the six-foot-nine German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck that he is indeed the world's tallest working film director, with a name that is almost the horizontal equivalent of the vertical stature mentioned in every single interview published with him.

"Michael Crichton?" von Donnersmarck asks as he slides onto the nearby couch. Reportedly, they're the same height--just over two meters. For a conversation about his first feature, "The Lives of Others" (Die Lieben der Anderen), a controlled, suspenseful, paranoid delight, it seemed the right comic note, heightened a few minutes later when I discovered my tape recorder wasn't working (luckily, my cell phone could do the job instead).

Set in East Germany in the early 1980s, several years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, "The Lives of Others" tracks two lives. Captain Gerd Weisler (Ulrich Muhe, "Funny Games"), an agent of the Stasi, the secret police which held the goal "to know everything" about the citizenry, takes up residence with banks of tape recorders in the attic above the flat of more-socialist-than-thou but vulnerable playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). "Our only non-subversive writer who is read in the West," harrumphs one of the artistic commissars.

Muhe's minimalist performance is marvelous (even if you do not know that as a young actor in East Germany, he was spied upon by Stasi), with subtle fluctuations in his role as a watcher, a noticer, as a spy, but like an artist or a voyeur or a movie reviewer. There are layers of timeless parable throughout, and "The Lives of Others" is an exemplar of how ideas can be explored with more emotional immediacy and even authenticity in fiction than in documentary.

There is a moment indicative of how the directness and simplicity of the 33-year-old veteran of several shorts' design functions: soon after Weisler has moved into place, he tries to imagine Dreyman's entire life through sound alone. ("Presumably, intercourse follows," he notes to his superiors after conversation stills between the couple.) The twenty minutes or so it took to wire the apartment for sound is the only visual reference that Weisler has, and von Donnersmarck shows him chalking the floor to indicate the rooms below, trying to make visual a world that is only in his mind, but also functioning like a set designer or director in the theater blocking out an as-yet unfinished representation of reality. It's not obtrusive, lovely in its own way, and it echoes even a few days after seeing the film. Another directorial touch: shots that are intercut between the observer and the observed, as an almost continuous set of motions that suggest their interlocked tanz, a tango of suspicion, but one that also causes Weisler to begin questioning, how does a patriot act?

Spending part of his childhood in New York, and a graduate in philosophy from Oxford, von Donnersmarck's English is strong, and despite the art-house trappings of his taut, compelling first feature, he's interested in other genres, and in particular, several studio filmmakers, especially Robert Zemeckis and Peter Weir. I'd brought up Weir because of the quiet intricacy of the sound design, and he continued by championing Zemeckis. (He's told other interviewers he wouldn't mind making a broad comedy or a horror picture, but didn't want to be pigeonholed at the start of his career as a genre specialist.) Zemeckis, he suggests, is a great and misunderstood artist because his work is "democratic"--texts that function as quiet and unassertive craft with depths of subtext that can be read differently by multiple audiences.

We talked as well about a subplot that introduces the name of Bertolt Brecht, the playwright and idealist whose years in East Germany surely disappoints the hopes he had for the potential of some sort of socialist utopia. His poetry, von Donnersmarck says, demonstrates the sort of artistic confidence he would like to attain, and I suggested that there is a sardonic and pragmatic side to the poetry that's harder to find in his drama. Speaking of production design, von Donnersmarck cites another confident artist in underlining his belief that subtraction is always the way when designing a setting or a frame. "Do you know who Hergé is? The man who drew Tintin? I always ask, `What would Hergé do?'"

"The Lives of Others" opens Friday.

(2007-02-13)

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