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azdak at 11:15am on 11/11/2007
azdak at 11:15am on 11/11/2007Spoilers for Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others
After a run of bad choices with films and DVDs, we saw Das Leben der Anderen last night and it was wonderful! It took me a while to figure out that it was a fairy tale, rather than a searing exposure of life under the Stasi (this comes from never reading reviews in case I get spoiled for the plot), but once I did it was entirely delightful. A bit long and anvilicious in places, and with occasional unnecessary scenes of emoting, but the acting was absolutely marvellous, including a star turn by the Stasi expert in typewriters, which proved once again the truth of Stanislavksy's saying that there are no small parts, only small actors. And it was FUNNY! A German comedy with a light(ish) touch! The scene with the Erich Honecker jokes had me rolling in the aisles (especially when the would-be comedian turned up in the envelope-opening scene near the end). The actors all had an excellent sense of comic timing, without ever falling out of character, and the evil careerists were particularly appealing in their multi-faceted revoltingness. Also, the two staged versions of Dreymann's play, one full-blown socialist realism and the other a spot-on parody of modern Regietheater, were hilarious (although from the excerpts we heard I'm not sure that I didn't prefer Wiesler's Lenin play...) And the emotional pay-off, when Dreymann reads through his Stasi files and discovers the life that HGW had constructed for him, is one of the most satisfying narrative moments I've come across is a long time. Great stuff.
After a run of bad choices with films and DVDs, we saw Das Leben der Anderen last night and it was wonderful! It took me a while to figure out that it was a fairy tale, rather than a searing exposure of life under the Stasi (this comes from never reading reviews in case I get spoiled for the plot), but once I did it was entirely delightful. A bit long and anvilicious in places, and with occasional unnecessary scenes of emoting, but the acting was absolutely marvellous, including a star turn by the Stasi expert in typewriters, which proved once again the truth of Stanislavksy's saying that there are no small parts, only small actors. And it was FUNNY! A German comedy with a light(ish) touch! The scene with the Erich Honecker jokes had me rolling in the aisles (especially when the would-be comedian turned up in the envelope-opening scene near the end). The actors all had an excellent sense of comic timing, without ever falling out of character, and the evil careerists were particularly appealing in their multi-faceted revoltingness. Also, the two staged versions of Dreymann's play, one full-blown socialist realism and the other a spot-on parody of modern Regietheater, were hilarious (although from the excerpts we heard I'm not sure that I didn't prefer Wiesler's Lenin play...) And the emotional pay-off, when Dreymann reads through his Stasi files and discovers the life that HGW had constructed for him, is one of the most satisfying narrative moments I've come across is a long time. Great stuff.