The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Intently listening.

A second viewing.

With Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" being its closest cinematic kin, "The Lives of Others", one of the decade's best films and is also a stunning directorial debut by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, is also exceptional in its well-calculated thrills and is touchingly human in its very essence, which more or less separates it from the aforementioned paranoid classic. "The Lives of Others", with its beautiful emotional center that develops and permeates throughout the film, elevates itself from merely being a strongly-acted piece about the iron-fisted times of the German Democratic Republic into a genuinely transcendent piece about the beauty and mystery of human nature.

Set in 1980's East Germany during the times when German socialism is at an all-time high, privacy invasions through surveillances a commonality, and the destruction of the Berlin Wall nothing but an unrealized fantasy. Wiesler, played by the late Ulrich Muhe in a truly underrated performance that I think should be considered as one of the best in the last twenty years or so, is a seemingly cold surveillance expert and Stasi (German secret police) agent with principles that are well-intact, objective methods for investigations that are proven to be effective, and a solitary way of life. For many years, he has been a success in his field, capable of making suspected radicals squeal the names of associates and potential inciters of rebellion against the state confess to whatever they know. But despite of his strengths and an ability to thoroughly dissect, he struggles to connect.

"Stay a little while", says Wiesler as he futilely tries to convince a cheap prostitute to stay with him after they had a stiff sexual intercourse. Ironically, he is a man that technically controls the fate of those he interrogates and wiretaps but can't even guide his own. Here is a man whose existence has been rendered almost meaningless by his work but still oblivious of the fact.

Enter Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright, and Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), a stage actress: a couple that has been ordered to be put under surveillance technically because of radical suspicions but is really about Minister Hempf's (Thomas Thieme), a Stasi superior, ulterior intent to personally own Christa-Maria for his own sexual fulfillment.

Wiesler willingly signed up for the former but never for the latter; and to make his situation even more conflicted, Dreyman is slowly turning into the serious GDR critic that he was always suspected to be. And to make it even worse, Wiesler is silently being drawn into the couple's personal world plagued by emotional imperfections and forces they cannot control but nonetheless proved to fit Wiesler's concept of transcendent human connection. Furthermore, it's a world that Wiesler has never experienced before let alone felt. They represent his most hidden of hopes and the very truth of his own being.

But there's one personal challenge for him: He mustn't fly too close to the fire. Should he be the silently harsh Stasi agent that he always was? Or should he be a silent crusader for the sake of what's more righteous and more beautiful, at least for him?

From such a simple character as Wiesler, in a performance by Ulrich Muhe that is brilliantly understated and flawlessly complete, "The Lives of Others" has brilliantly embraced emotional importance and an unconditional faith in humanity more than the usual conundrums of a suspense-filled affair.

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck once mentioned in an interview (and is also mentioned briefly in the film) that he was always fascinated of the fact that Vladimir Lenin, as it was told, can't seem to bring himself into finishing the Russian revolution every time he listens to Beethoven's 'Appasionata', his favorite musical piece of all time.

If the power of art can bring or manipulate people to such momentary departures from who they really are, how powerful can it really be? But is that really the case? What if art and beauty, in fact, brings people closer into what they really are? "The Lives of Others" sided with the potential idea that humans are innately good and that humanity, for whatever it has been all throughout history, always strives for an inner truth. The oblivious Wiesler unconsciously did, and unlike Lenin, his 'Appasionata' never stopped playing.

FINAL RATING

The Serpent's Egg (Ingmar Bergman)

Liv Ullmann and David Carradine.

I am really not quite sure what really is "The Serpent's Egg" more weighing flaw: The whole alienating premise of the film or David Carradine's robotic performance. But basing my choice on my better judgment, I'm gearing more towards the latter.

Throughout this whole Ingmar Bergman-directed feature, aside from that final, pseudo-scientific revelation, the film really felt nothing but an aimless exercise in existential angst. With our disillusioned and hapless protagonist roaming the decaying streets of 1920's Berlin that is completely unaware of a governmental take-over being led by someone named Adolf Hitler, I think that the groundwork as to why he's slowly being consumed by despair was not properly established, resulting with us being left with a main character that is both underwhelming and emotionally plodding.

I just don't think that David Carradine, a cult actor known for roles such as "Caine" in "Kung Fu" (a bit unrelated but it's interesting to note that his character here is then named "Abel"; a sort of an unconscious biblical allusion) and later as "Bill" in Tarantino's "Kill Bill", fits these kinds of roles. He's just relatively too tough-looking to really make his character believable and empathetic. Even Liv Ullmann, an actress of great emotional depth, is a bit out of place playing a forgettable character.

But then, there's Sven Nykvist's calculated cinematography that constantly puts dread and bleakness even in the most joyous cabaret settings and at the same time, finds emptiness even in a crowd. This is particularly evident in the film's impressive and disturbingly ambiguous opening scene (that is, until the climactic final exposition) where Nykvist has shot a scene of people of different ages and walks of life descending a stair with deeply melancholic and exhausted faces in stark, grainy black and white.

At certain points, the film's flimsy hands seem to let go of my already fleeting attention, but there's no doubt about the uncannily fascinating impression that the climactic 'explanation' scene, pulled off rather brilliantly by Heinz Bennent who played an experimentation scientist who knows the core secret as to why people like Abel are slowly slipping off from sanity, has left me.

Yes, it does felt that that crucially revelatory sequence looked and sounded more like a scene that you may see from those 'mad scientist' movies rather than from 'art' films like this, but for it to prophetically foretell the Nazi revolution's supposed 'New Society' and at the same time highlighting and comparing its idealistic superiority to an old one founded by the goodness of man is truly unnerving and, in a way, very brave.

And considering that this is Ingmar Bergman's first and only Hollywood film, "The Serpent's Egg" should be remembered more as a testament of his unbounded audacity rather than as a disappointing speed bump in his otherwise flawless oeuvre.

FINAL RATING

Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer)

Lola is running. Uh, well, that's given.

Judging from its title alone, "Run Lola Run" can easily be surmised as being fueled with non-stop kinetics, both in its characters' and camera's movements. This is particularly given for a film so much known for its music video-type, stylish editing techniques, an unorthodox time frame and a colorful assortment of characters. But thematically speaking, "Run Lola Run" is also surprisingly rich and capable with its inclusion of some pop theoretical approaches to the almost impenetrable concept of 'destiny' and its 'every-minute-of-the-day' fragility.

"The ball is round, a game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theory," said the security guard in the film's opening scene, holding a soccer ball and subsequently kicking it up in the air. I think it is quite accurate to consider and analogize that the 'ball' is us, the 'game' is our existence and the pure theory is the film itself. This is what makes the film considerably special in its own right aside from its distinct visuals and 'back and forth' story structure.

Unlike other films who seems to overly wallow in their own constructed philosophies, "Run Lola Run", backed by a masterful direction by Tom Tykwer, tends to be more speculative than indulgent. As our protagonist Lola (perfectly played by Franka Potente) runs through streets and sidewalks and as she meets different fates after another, the film raises itself up the ground and above the rest and lays down its two cents. But that does not necessarily mean that it is not entirely confident with its intellectual concepts because it was quite sure with what it wants to talk about even in the opening scenes alone (with introductory quotes by T.S. Eliot and Sepp Herberger), but the film never stresses them. It never forces them to its audience. It is carefully lively with its exposition, but never too lively to spoon feed them to us.

"Run Lola Run" never fully strives to be too intellectual; plainly speaking, it is just a purely inventive film made for the MTV generation of the time. But with its unique humility regarding its underlying notions about space, time and the endgame of life hidden by the exuberant editing and the immediacy of real time, the film looked more intelligent as a result with its orderly outward flow. Although that is quite ironic considering that the film is about the constant disorder that is 'life'.

Its scenario is simple enough. Simple enough that it may only just warrant a short film's running time. A small-time hood named Manni (played by Moritz Bleibtreu) is set to deliver to his superiors 100000 Deutsche Marks. But the problem is Lola, his girlfriend, never came at the right time to pick him up. As a result, Manni took a cab on the way to the subway to ride a train to the agreed upon delivery place. But again, there's a problem: Manni's inept attention to details and his tension towards the police.

He unwittingly left the bag of money in the train seats, only to be possessed by a dirty vagabond (played by Joachim Krol, whose character's beard in the film reminds me of Sam Rockwell's in "Moon"). Manni then calls Lola for her to do something about it or else, his superior will kill him. Lola begs Manni to stay at the phone booth and that she will do something about it, but her boyfriend is one impatient fellow. If she doesn't arrive to where he's at after twenty minutes, he will go and rob the grocery store across the said phone booth he's in.

So here begins Lola's (and at some extent, also Manni's) animated (quite literally), frantic and desperate adventure for the 100000 Deutsche Marks and for love's sake. As she runs her way into whatever she can come up with, I can see her extreme love to Manni, but is it already bordering martyrdom? Or is she subliminally guilt-ridden by her initial lateness?

Of course, her moped (a motor vehicle) was stolen that's why she hasn't arrived on time at Manni's picking point, but she ignores that detail. She runs and runs and runs, thinking of the simplest means out of a situation that is brought forth by the most complex and mysterious of forces: Chance. On the surface, the film plays like a Tarantino-esque ode to the confusing deconstruction of time, but as its characters transitionally act in the most urgent of means, the film's stupefying idea about the relative changes of destinies resulted by even the slightest of bumps and the shortest of time delays runs in the background.

"Run Lola Run" is a relentless, race against time thriller/adventure with a great soundtrack. But at the same time, it is also a highly creative take on the abstract yet compelling nature of time and minute decisions, the considerably large role of people in altering the linear trajectory of what we call 'time' and finally, the truthful fact that as these said changes may really do happen, we might not know it. And that if ever we do, we just might as well not know what to do with it.

Lola, for her uncommon nature to stop wrong decisions and miscalculations of time (and also to scream real loud like that boy in "The Tin Drum"), is our inner 'fantasy for omniscience's' envy. Our lives are 'unrelenting adventures', her life is a 'choose your own adventure'. Both are entirely different, but the recurring comedy of errors proves to be the enjoining force. "Run Lola Run" is indeed very fun, but some of its repetitively cyclic patterns prove to be its slight drawback. Oh, but so is life.

FINAL RATING

Good Bye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker)

'Oh well, goodbye then'.

I was quite weary before watching this film as I haven't been that familiar with the history of German division aside from the fall of Berlin Wall and well, Reagan's famous 'tear down this wall' speech. But "Good Bye, Lenin!", with a narrator (that's also the film's protagonist) that seem far too poetic at times but ultimately convincing, delivered the necessary information with a tone of mundane deliberateness to highlight the character's naturalism for audiences to follow the film's political background closely .

It's as if there's a far more important theme to tackle other than socialist intricacies. But of course, there is: An enduring story of a son's love to his mother devoid of any conditionals.

After his socialist mother (Katrin Sass in an impressive performance) has awakened from an 8-month comma due to a heart attack, Alex (played by Daniel Bruhl, whom you may recognize as Frederick Zoller in the later Tarantino film "Inglourious Basterds"), who have learned from the doctor that his mother shouldn't be shocked or hooked into excitement in any way whatsoever as it may result to complications, is eager to keep her home. But complications is never just a health dilemma. The Berlin Wall has fallen. It's now one Germany, and the stocks of Spreewald gherkins has cruised into scarcity. Her mother's reality has turned into a unified land filled with alien capitalism.

He faced the situation with a calm demeanor and absurdist resolute, and helped by his friend and aspirant filmmaker Denis (Florian Lukas, who's like a cross between Robert Carlyle and a younger Ed Harris), decided to re-create GDR in ingenious kinds of ways as to prevent her mother from having the heart-thumping revelation of her life. A well-intended deception heightened by comedy. A 'comedy' that surely roots out from social idealism (the mother) suppressed by empirical determination.

Director Wolfgang Becker directed these sequences with uncommon energy and quirks that the first hour of the film flowed so effortlessly with quick pace, ease and story-telling delight. Yet from those elements mainly conceived from clever concepts and scenarios, "Good Bye, Lenin!" is still focused in its human drama.

It's less a politically-toned film than it is a penetrating study of connection (Alex's family), re-connection (the father sub-plot) and disconnection (from A horrid emotional past and the attachment to the GDR). Of course, from the point of view of a German who have experienced the social atmosphere of East/West Germany, "Good Bye, Lenin!" is mainly affecting due to the countless nostalgic references to olden times and the euphoric destruction of separatist sentiments. But from those way outside looking in (like me), what's very special with this film is its balance of happiness and melancholy by way of how it highlights the fun of liberty and the anguish of mistakes.

"Good Bye, Lenin!" is very eloquent on all sides, capturing the essential 'celebratory' mood of reunified Germany and the irony of the countless ruins and how it tries to accommodate its reverberated surroundings in desperate vain, especially how the wrecked Lenin statue hanging below a helicopter seems to communicate something to Alex's mother (one of the many great scenes in the film) as if asking for forgiveness or asking for her hand and saying, 'my child, my deeply socialist child, come with me'.

From its shifting pace to comic moments and times of tears, "Good Bye, Lenin!" has been strongly consistent with the entirety of its delivery and it has rendered a political reverie-turned reality into a convincing world of varied emotions and where euphemistic acceptance is a possibility. And moreover, departing from the complexities, the film is, simply put, a lasting love letter to all mothers who have loved their children unlike any other.

FINAL RATING

Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen)

Submerged claustrophobia.

Film Review Archive (date seen: September 18, 2010)

Claustrophobic and tense, "Das Boot" is an epic human study of survival set in the less-explored battlefields of the great second world war: the vast nothingness of the oceans. We know the stories of war zones: Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, Normandy. All has been said about those places: heroism, tragedy, casualties, you name it. But then there lies, beneath the watery abyss, the untold lives and existence of U-boat crews. The tension, anticipation, disappointments and camaraderie. Who would have surmised that a film out of these would be conceived? And even more so, the Germans, the much-dreaded stereotypical villains of the war genre, as chief protagonists? Director Wolfgang Petersen broke the boundaries of the genre and presented the said race not as ideological, ethnocentric monsters, but as vulnerable individuals that still cower on the face of imminent danger.

Jurgen Prochnow is unforgettable as the U-boat's captain, having the required experience and strength of character for such position, but still mentally encapsulated by endless insecurities and anxiety about the military hardware and capabilities of the Nazi regime. There were sequences of supreme technicalities always obligatory on the war genre but ultimately surpassing it and boasts not of the loud explosions and hard clashing of metals, but its brilliant foreshadowing of tension, its perfectly-balanced criss-cross between the narrow, sweaty confines of the U-boats' interior and the turbulent expanse of the perilous waters. Some complain about its long running time, but I think its the right approach to the film to thoroughly maintain the distress throughout the film, bombard audiences' senses with relentless suspense and create a credible bond and affection between the characters.

Adolf Hitler is on his podium, reciting reasons of the Aryan race's supremacy and yelling preposterous ideologies. But deep down the unforgiving bowels of the seas, lies the men to whom the world he promised; disillusioned, desperate, and hungry for home, they don't care about global conquest, they just need the 'silent run' and the 'surface'.

FINAL RATING