My friends and I participate in an Oscar pool every year and I pride myself on (often) having one of the larger percentages of correct guesses. In February of 2007 I thought I had the Best Foreign Film award in the bag. Pan’s Labyrinth was sweeping other categories such as cinematography and it was the easy favorite for best foreign. I was shocked - and a little miffed - when Germany’s The Lives of Others swooped in and stole the prize. I figured it was a case of Academy Awards arrogance run amuck, of which there are many each year (Gangs of New York nominated for best picture, anyone?), but after finally watching Germany’s official submission on DVD, I can confidently say that it would have been a travesty for The Lives of Others to have not taken home the golden statue.

Set in East Germany five years before the fall of the Berlin wall, The Lives of Others stars Ulrich Mühe as Weisler, a cold, by-the-numbers wiretap expert for the stasi, the East German secret police. He is assigned to monitor Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Kock), a famous playwright who is suspected of crimes against the socialist state. As he begins to record the intimate conversations and whisperings of Dreyman and his actress girlfiend, Weisler enters a world for which he has no compass, a world his communist rhetoric has left him woefully unequipped to handle.

I know next to nothing about what life was like behind the wall before November 9, 1989, but the meticulous research that went into every frame of this film is inescapable. There is no doubt in your mind that you are looking through a window in time to East Germany as it was. The opening scene introduces us to this world through a lecture that Weisler is giving on interrogation techniques. As he plays an audio tape for the class, we are shown the actual interrogation as it happened. The suspect is not treated violently as one might expect and there is no torture other than sleep deprivation. They are asked the same questions over and over in a calm and calculated way. As Weisler addresses his class, he even makes a kind of logical sense. Perhaps Eastern Germany is not the oppressive society we had always thought. In closing, Weisler holds up a jar with a dirty orange cloth in it for his students. “You must not forget the most important part,” he tells them. The cloth had been placed underneath the suspect during the entire interrogation and it was soaked with their sweat. “You must remember to keep the cloth, so if needs be, the dogs can find the scent.” Weisler’s eyes punctuate his words with an unspoken warning: if you’re an enemy of the state, it could be your scent that the dogs chase one day.

This sense of palpable fear permeates the entire society. Everyone is always looking over their back, watching what they say, wondering if their apartments have been tapped. It is Big Brother in the flesh, and the fact that the film is set in 1984 is certainly no coincidence. Weisler is the face of this omniscient entity and Ulrich Mühe plays him brilliantly. It is one of the most moving and effective performances that I have ever witnessed on film. As he sits in an upstairs attic, surrounded by audio equipment, eavesdropping intently to Dreyman’s rendition of Mozart on the piano, we are only shown what is happening to Weisler through his eyes. There is no dialogue, no grand facial gestures. Only the eyes. Weisler is experiencing something, he is hearing something that his drab world has never shown him before: beauty. And in his eyes you witness the most amazing transformation. It is a spiritual moment, a road-to-Damascus conversion, and I cried when I saw it.

Ultimately, Weisler is forced to make decisions he would never have even contemplated previously, and these decisions lead inexorably towards tragedy even as he attempts to stop it. The climax of the film is both riveting and heartbreaking, and if The Lives of Others had chosen to stop there, it would still have been a ‘good’ film. So many foreign and independent movies choose that route, to end in tragedy rather than risk the melodrama of a ‘happy’ ending. It often makes them seem edgy, hip, and artistic, especially if they violently kill off all of their main characters (I submit The Departed for your consideration). The Lives of Others could have easily joined that crowd of films, and if it had it would have been the cream of them, the best example of independent tragedy. But it chooses to rise far above such pettiness. The ending is not melodramatic, it is not sappy, it is nothing like what you could have possibly imagined. It is subtle and touching and beautiful and redemptive. It is the perfect ending and it takes The Lives of Others from simply being ‘good’ to being unequivocally ‘great.’

First time writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has created a work of pure elegance, on both a technical and an emotional level. There is no fluff, no gratuitous camera work, no insipid dialogue, nothing to distract from the simple (and yet complex) story. That it was Ulrich Mühe’s final film before he died of stomach cancer only adds to its poignancy. In terms of acting, he could have left no greater legacy.

Simply put, The Lives of the Others is one of the finest films I have ever seen. I cannot recommend it highly enough