The Lives of Others and The Decomposition of the Soul.

"The only pleasure of The Lives of Others is how Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's obscenely lauded film has allowed for the US release of The Decomposition of the Soul, the first essential documentary of the new year," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. Decomposition opens tomorrow for a one-week engagement at New York's Film Forum.

J Hoberman draws a parallel I certainly hadn't thought of, much less considered: "The Lives of Others is a materialist gloss on Wim Wenders's free-floating allegory of divided Berlin, Wings of Desire. No less than Bruno Ganz's empathetic seraphim, [Gerd] Wiesler [Ulrich Mühe] longs to be human." Hoberman's bottom line, though, is that the film "is a compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama. As the Stasi-man becomes more human, the movie's tragic trajectory is betrayed by an increasingly squishy humanism - even more than the artists he's invented, the filmmaker exercises the power to make everything (almost) right." Then: "The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike The Lives of Others, it offers no closure."

Updated through 2/11.

In New York, David Edelstein calls Lives "a Kafkaesque tearjerker, a tragic farce." Its "longish denouement" is "corny and contrived, but we seize on it with relief - as we seize on the Mahleresque romanticism of Gabriel Yared's score." As for Decomposition, "it's a hushed, poetic meditation on the life of Stasi prisoners in which two former inmates, Hartmut Richter and Sigrid Paul, traipse in and out of empty cells and interrogation rooms in the Berlin-Hohenschonhausen, which operated from 1951 until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. As they softly relay their stories - of sleep and sensory deprivation, of the interrogators' sadistic tricks, of the dangling of false hope, the camera fastens on stools, desks, and other ordinary objects. We fix on them the way the prisoners must have, grasping for solidity in a fast-dissolving world."

Jason Bogdaneris at the L Magazine on Decomposition: "The cumulative effect is a devastating indictment of man’s worst instincts gone unchecked." And Mark Asch: "The Lives of Others is a model of self-containment and moral responsibility - so much so that it starts to feel like a filmed syllabus."

"We are reminded of The Conversation, which kept Gene Hackman, king of the listening device, locked in a Wiesler-like solitude," writes Anthony Lane of Lives in the New Yorker. "Dazzling though Coppola's film was, it was at some level a fantasy, dreaming of dark conspiracies with which to spice our lives. That is a luxury von Donnersmarck cannot afford, and the paranoia shown within his movie is not a nightmare. It's government policy."

Michelle Orange talks with FHvD for IFC News.

Earlier: Michael Guillén's interview.

Updates, 2/7: Of the two films, notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, "The Decomposition of the Soul is a tougher sell partly because it offers no palliatives, though partly because it's a bore. It takes more than a worthy subject to make a good documentary, after all; it takes intelligent, specific, directed filmmaking. The German-born Ms Toussaint and the Italian-born Mr Iannetta have seized on a fine subject and, in Hartmut Richter and Sigrid Paul, former Stasi prisoners, found witnesses who put a face on a national calamity. Yet they have made a film as austere and barren as an old Stasi prison hallway."

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "It's a fatal flaw of The Lives of Others that the world it depicts never seems reasonably inhabited - von Donnersmarck recreates a sense of overwhelming oppression but never gives us an inkling of life grinding on and mostly functioning despite it."

Eric Kohn finds that Decomposition "fascinates despite its structural flaws." Also at the Reeler, Vadim Rizov talks with FHvD and adds that Lives' "unambiguous political bite speaks more boldly than its maker. Which is probably as it should be: von Donnersmarck’s film is about the necessity of artists speaking out against repressive regimes. Now that the East has fallen, it would be against his purpose to make a statement as strong as that of his fictional playwright. The film itself is enough."

Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE: "Decomposition's approach is thus clinically architectural as compared to a more standard documentary like [S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine] but not a degree less human for that. Going over the vestiges of the cruelest and most extreme authoritarianism, Toussaint and Iannetta create a vivid, harrowing testimony from a bare minimum of visual evidence."

"How surprising that a new German film would teach Americans about human faith at a time when acclaimed movies like Borat lack faith," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "The Lives of Others also dovetails with Robert De Niro's disgracefully overlooked The Good Shepherd. Both movies explore the soul of a country through individuals caught in difficult situations but - most importantly - seen without judgment."

Online listening tip. FHvD is a guest on Fresh Air.

Updates, 2/9: Lives is a "suspenseful, ethically exacting drama, beautifully realized by the writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Posing a stark, difficult question - how does a good man act in circumstances that seem to rule out the very possibility of decent behavior? - it illuminates not only a shadowy period in recent German history, but also the moral no man’s land where base impulses and high principles converge."

Slate's Dana Stevens notes that FHvD "has said that Western audiences (those from West Berlin, he means, but it's all the more true for those of us points farther West) tend to regard his debut feature, The Lives of Others, as a thriller, while East Berliners experience it as a kind of therapy. The stunning thing about The Lives of Others, a nominee for the best foreign language film Oscar that all but swept the German Lola awards last year, is that it's equally powerful as both."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek maps the first scene, and then: "As openings go, this one isn't particularly graphic or even suspenseful: The camera movement is almost placid, as if it were faking disinterest. But the sequence gives a firm sense of a country in which paranoia is a part of the air, like a toxin leeching oxygen from it. And with it, director and writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck begins building the layers of emotional texture that ultimately make The Lives of Others... so moving, and so deeply satisfying."

In Gay City News, Steve Erickson focuses on Lives' "forced naiveté in redeeming both Wiesler and Dreyman and its assumption that there's something groundbreaking about treating the former as a human being. Both capitalism and Communism have an amazing ability to co-opt art and artists into becoming cogs in their wheels. In The Lives of Others, those wheels turn in the opposite direction-art has the magical power to save men's souls."

There's another interview with FHvD at indieWIRE, where Chris Wisniewski finds the film offers "sturdy storytelling that never fully transcends its own limitations and generic trappings."

Updates, 2/11: Stuart Klawans in the Nation on Lives and Grbavica: "Both, I think, are pretty good. But as much as each film tells us about its subject matter, the pair tell us even more about the tastes of juries and prize committees in Europe, and their eagerness to create the next star director."

Jürgen Fauth: "In the final analysis, [Lives'] conclusion strikes a note that is somewhat too conciliatory. There is no doubt, however, that von Donnersmark made a gripping drama that vividly evokes a quickly-receding historical reality and, at the same time, provides a timely lesson about the costs - on all sides - of a system that runs roughshod over its citizens' civil liberties."

Tessa DeCarlo on Lives in the Brooklyn Rail: "By turns witty and horrifying, moving and puzzle-box clever, visually delicious and morally profound, it dramatizes the terrible price a society pays when it destroys trust in pursuit of security."

Michael Guillén passes along a comment from Robert Koehler that sheds some truly unflattering light on FvHD. Glenn Kenny interviews him.

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on Decomposition: "The art of Iannetta and Toussaint is to make this steely building assume a species of being.... A strange phenomenon occurs: the camera itself becomes one of the prisoners in this place. The camera itself becomes another victim of the tacit torment in the film's title." And on Lives: "[D]espite the fact that parts of this film remind us of past pictures with comparable themes, the director and his actors make it immediate, gripping."

Lives "clearly articulates both the thirtysomething German director's technical facility and his understanding of palatably packaged cultural history as the safest road to the international market," writes Fernando F Croce at Slant. "The Orwellian intimations (the sprawling narrative kicks off in 1984) are, like the copious shout-outs to Brecht and Beethoven, catnip to audiences who never heard of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum [?] or cannot recall how more searchingly Francis Ford Coppola employed surveillance to study emotional alienation in The Conversation."

Michelle Orange at the Reeler on the "coda": "Something about these final scenes feels uneasy, as though they might set the rest of the film off balance with a false move or unnecessary play for pathos, but von Donnersmarck proves himself beyond doubt, moving with purpose toward a grace note of quiet benediction."

Posted by dwhudson at February 6, 2007 1:56 PM