As I've said before, there was one film in the Oscars race that sounded really special. After reading John Podhoretz's rave, I'm even more eager to see it:
It's hard to know where to begin in praising "The Lives of Others", the first movie written and directed by a 33-year-old German with the traffic-stopping name of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. "The Lives of Others" joins the Russian film "Burnt by the Sun" on a very short list of motion-picture masterpieces that portray the compromises a totalitarian state demands of those unfortunate enough to live inside a prison-country. And it joins "Citizen Kane", no less, on the very short list of the most impressive debut films in the history of cinema...
Donnersmarck's work is so fresh and so original in part because he is working with a great, rich, infinitely absorbing subject--a subject other filmmakers across the world continue to avoid like the plague. This is strange. Life under communism would seem to be among the least controversial topics one could imagine. After all, who outside of Vladimir Putin's inner circle actually longs for a restoration of the Soviet Empire? But you can count on two hands and a foot the number of major motion pictures made since the dissolution of the Soviet Union that have attempted any kind of reckoning of the human cost of communism in the 20th century.
You can watch the trailer here.
That is some praise. I was dissapointed that the imaginative and dark fairy tale set in Franco's Spain, Pan's Labyrinth, did not win the Oscar, but this is high priase indeed.
Posted by: Jay | Tuesday, March 06, 2007 at 12:48 PM