Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's tragic farce about the fate of East German artists during the last years of the GDR, The Lives of Others, was partly prompted by a childhood memory of the time his East German-born mother was strip-searched by Stasi agents. "It fascinated me that a government could have that kind of power, they could actually undress my all-powerful mother."

The film opens on an emotional strip-search, peeled away to reveal the dark workings of an all-powerful, all-knowing state apparatus. Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is interrogating an artist. The suspect denies knowing the information Wiesler is after. We cut from the interrogation to Wiesler explaining the tricks of his trade to a classroom full of eager apprentice Stasi agents. Wiesler explains how a suspect who methodically repeats claims of innocence is invariably lying. He demonstrates how during the 40 hours of sleep-deprived questioning, the subject breaks down and coughs up the desired name. Wiesler then shows how an odor sample is retrieved from the suspect's chair, and put in a sealed jar for dogs trained to track a man by the odor of his fear.

Wiesler earns applause from his boss, Stasi Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur). That evening, Grubitz and Wiesler attend a drama by the GDR's top playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), starring the country's leading actress and Dreyman's live-in girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).

Dreyman is introduced as the GDR's proudest product, an artist completely loyal to the state, yet still revered in the West. At a party, Dreyman's invincible status is undercut by Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who crudely leers at Sieland while mocking Dreyman's attempt at rescuing his beloved colleague, the blacklisted director Albert Jerska.

Wiesler's next assignment will be the undressing of Dreyman via highly sophisticated snooping devices planted in the playwright's apartment that can detect a whispered conversation or a bedroom embrace.

The Lives of Others might have been subtitled The Sentimental Education of a Stasi Agent, for it is during the weeks that Wiesler listens in on the couple's lovemaking that he starts to compare the emotional richness of their lives with the poverty of his own. A funny/sad scene shows Wiesler fixing a frugal meal, poured from a tube, then receiving a cursory visit from a state-approved prostitute, who explains why she can't tarry after his abbreviated orgasm. "I'm on a schedule, there are several of you guys in this building."

Music informs this heartbreaking film about the modern world's seemingly inevitable march towards the abolition of personal privacy, and not only in the former GDR. The film's score is by the Oscar-winning composer Gabriel Yared, who penned the haunting soundtrack for The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The piece de resistance of Yared's work is his composition of The Sonata for a Good Man, a composition given to Dreyman by his director friend Jerska, whose suicide is a catalyst for the undressing of the film's principal characters. It prompts the normally scrupulous Wiesler to begin to subtly alter his daily logs of Dreyman/Sieland's lovemaking and post-coital intimacies. Wiesler is incensed when he learns that the vendetta against Dreyman is fueled by Col. Grubitz's toadying up the Stasi hierarchy's greasy pole, while Hempf is just after a cheap piece of ass.

In an odd way, von Donnersmarck's political tragedy becomes an almost delicious political farce. By 1984, the GDR had no real political justification, and the Stasi bosses were employing the ruthless state machine for their own purposes.

Col. Grubitz explains how a high-profile writer like Dreyman is actually more valuable to the state if he is so demoralized that he stops writing altogether. The silky smooth Tukur makes the totalitarian rationale almost poetic. Thomas Thieme, an actor who, like Ulrich Muhe, was a real-life Stasi victim, invokes political bullies from Hermann Goering to G. Gordon Liddy as he shoves chicken into his mouth while taunting Dreyman for his futile attempt to save his friend.

In The Lives of Others, there's a nasty connection between sexual and artistic impotence and state-sponsored wiretapping. Dreyman's artistic soul is rescued from high-level hackwork and political snooping by a mole who turns artist in his own way, conceding at film's end that "this one is for me."

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