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The lives of others won most of the top European and international film prizes between 2006 and 2007, including seven Lolas and an Oscar, but it has also been heavily attacked by some critics both for its sympathetic portrait of a Stasi officer and for its misogynistic portrait of a faithless, drug-addicted actress (e.g., Porton; Foundas). The monstrous Gerd Wiesler, critics have argued, is magically transformed into "the Good Man" of Georg Dreyman's novel after his sudden exposure to theater, poetry, and music, and the vulnerable Christa-Maria Sieland (Mar- tina Gedeck) must be sacrificed to the film's central love story, that between Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) and Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). In my view, much of this negative criticism implicitly acknowledges that Lives is tremendously suc- cessful at authentically recreating the East Ber- lin of the 1980s. The film captures the bleak- ness of the architecture, the cuisine, and the fashion in such unnerving detail that reviews insistently demand that the film deliver docu- mentary accuracy. I too responded to the film's authenticity and found its recreation of the East Berlin I had visited in 1983 uncanny and unset- tling. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took pains to film on location in the rare streets that had not been transformed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He refined the palette of the film to capture the sense of color in the German Demo- cratic Republic (GDR), so that greens stand in for blues and orange-browns replace reds (von Donnersmarck, Interview on DVD). Visually, the film strives for the quality of documentary.
But The Lives of Others is not a documentary. Although he researched his subject thoroughly for four years, von Donnersmarck's understand- ing of character, his interest in relationships, and his belief in the transformative power of art do not come from history, but from an educa- tion in classic Western cinema. We do not fault Casablanca (1942) or Rome, Open City (1945) for being sentimental. We do not blame The Red Shoes (1948) or The Third Man (1949) for being overblown. Instead, we celebrate these films for the courage of their sentimentality and hyperbole. And von Donnersmarck's first film is an homage to his cinematic heritage. The per- formance of Martina Gedeck cannot be divorced from...