It was no surprise that this should win an Oscar: technically proficient, superbly acted and humanist whilst bashing the ‘commies’. It is a gripping thriller but, as Anna Funder points out in Sight & Sound (May ‘07) utterly ridiculous. The Stasi member who is humanised by music and a poem by Brecht! Great to think so: play that music to Bush!
Funder, who’s book Stasiland (2004) is excellent, also points out that the Stasi are currently trying to rehabilitate themselves and so this sympathetic portrayal of a member of that organisation is politically dubious to say the least. But the film’s excellent for the reasons cited above and who wouldn’t want to believe that art can humanise a monstrous system? Well, those who run that system I suppose.
itp Global Film 
Your comments prompted me to go back and read the Funder article and also to begin to reflect on my first viewing of the film last year. I remember watching the film without any preconceptions and for the first hour thinking that it was very well written and effectively directed. But then I began to think that it was actually ‘over written’ and that the characters had little room to breathe. At the end, which I found provoking, I thought that perhaps it had been rescued with some plot tricks. After the screening, I briefly discussed it with Rona who was more unhappy with it than I was and I began to come round to her point of view. I think my eventual conclusion was that it was actually a genre thriller that had been saddled, deliberately or not, I wasn’t sure, with a lot of ideological baggage.
My main problem, I guess, is that I’m always suspicious of critiques of what happened under communism unless they come from socialists or humanists with impeccable credentials. Even then, as you suggest, they can be hijacked by critics and commentators from the right. My aim is to watch the film again and think about it a bit more. My reaction to Funder is that she treads dangerous ground in suggesting that this or that could never happen . . . it wasn’t possible etc. Sure enough in Sight & Sound August 2007, Paul Oestreicher responded with a letter that said that it did indeed happen. Worse, in Sight & Sound June 2007, Maggie Hoffgen points out that Funder’s article is sloppily written in confusing the successor to the Communist Party in the East, the PDS, with the SDP. ( I can’t believe she made such an error, perhaps a BFI editor changed the copy?)
I admire the technical skill and creative imagination that director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck showed and I have no problem with genre films, but I’d probably prefer a more nuanced account of either the conflicted self identity of a Stasi man or the story of the real people who suffered. Anyway, a re-viewing is certainly called for.
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