No, I have not stopped going to the cinema... I just didn't have the time to write anything about the films I had seen, or not much to say about them, or didn't know what to think about them.
But for this film I'll make an effort, because I do want to recomend it. The film "Das Leben der Anderen" is not a spy film, as someone had told me before watching it. Although it is a film about a time and about a place where spying was the norm, and not the exception.
The action takes place in Eastern Germany a few years before the fall of the Iron Courtain. It is the life of a playwriter and of the Stasi officer in charge of surveying him. The film is not an action film, all the contrary. It explores the relationship between the observer and the unaware observed one. This relationship becomes more complex when the officer in charge of the surveillance starts covering for the activities of his target. It is also about the different types of people and their reactions and attitudes towards a police state like that one.
An excellent film. If you like it, or if you are interested in that place, that time, the Stasi, etc, I would also recommend you a book. "The Man without a Face" are the memoires of Marcus Wolf, who was the director of the Stasi in its most active years. Very enlightening... ;-)
