Film
THE LIVES OF OTHERS Set in East Berlin circa 1984, when one in 100 citizens of the German Democratic Republic was a government informant, this aptly chilly look at communist surveillance culture could never have slipped past state security 20 years ago—even if it ends up concluding that a fastidious Stasi snoop (Ulrich Mühe) isn’t beyond redemption. Peeping on an allegedly subversive playwright (Sebastian Koch) from the discomfort of a frozen attic, his huge headphones doing double duty as earmuffs, secret police captain Gerd Wiesler sits in his down jacket and...sheds a tear.
More political intrigue: has young writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck whitewashed the Stasi by giving his secret policeman the faint hint of a heart? Certainly the film (this year’s Oscar winner for best foreign feature) suggests that East German totalitarianism had, before the end, acknowledged the error of its ways—which seems no less likely a scenario than that of rats fleeing a sinking ship. If the filmmaker commits a crime, it’s in pushing the character’s rehabilitation slightly too far—about as much as the weight of a teardrop. —Rob Nelson (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER Filmed simultaneously with his 1966 noir homage Made in U.S.A. (one shot in the morning, the other in the afternoon) and part of his Miles Davis-like string of form-shattering 1960s masterpieces, Jean-Luc Godard’s nervy, mind-blowing 1966 feature is a symphony of disharmony: a smashed-to-pieces study of a vapid housewife turned dilettante hooker (Marina Vlady) whose insatiable appetite for impulse shopping is framed against the modernist sci-fi horror of a Paris overrun with construction, billboards and featureless facades. Even the title exudes uncertainty: the opening credits fidget back and forth between “2...or 3,” and everything that follows is an agent of destabilization—the sneak-attack cuts from eerie silence to jarring industrial cacophony; the characters who speak directly to us and acknowledge their parts in a movie, wrecking what little illusion there is.
It’s typical of the film’s warring, contradictory spirit that its many soul-sucking consumer diversions—fashions, soapboxes, boxy little roadsters—have such dazzling graphic punch in Raoul Coutard’s widescreen cinematography. The movie’s a Lite-Brite pegboard of color. At the same time, Two or Three Things fights its own status as a product to be consumed. Godard sabotages all the shortcuts that let us watch a movie without thinking about its workings. Like a drowning man waving among ice floes, he struggles amid the movie’s narcotizing pop surfaces to claim our attention, disrupting the flow with semantic games, philosophical challenges and sonic outbursts, even questioning his methods on the soundtrack in a conspirator’s stage whisper. The effect this produces is the intellectual equivalent of a triple-shot caffeine buzz—as befits a movie whose most famous shot locates the mysteries of the cosmos in a swirling cup of coffee. —Jim Ridley (Now touring the country in a restored print; opens March 11 at the Belcourt)