Sonata for a Good Man

The Lives of Others forces the viewer to consider the revolutionary power of love, which is all tied up in the hope that love will endure, even through its imperfections (and the opposite of this, as seen in the problem of suicide). It is love and art that refuse to be contained by the dehumanizing forces of the Soviet system. And the hope that we see throughout the film is that people change--the faults that they have, then, are not final, nor are they unforgivable.

The film is set in communist Germany and centers around a playwright and his girlfriend, who are being followed by the secret police. As a result of their love for one another, they find strength to rebel against the system. When she is caught, however, the playwright's girlfriend looses strength and offers evidence against her boyfriend in order to save herself. In a Romeo and Juliet-esque ending, we find that the officer who had been assigned to follow the couple in fact destroyed the evidence in order to save them, but the girlfriend doesn't know this, gives up hope, and kills herself. The film is not a tragedy, however, for we see the complete change and awakening that occurred in the officer who was assigned to track the couple--the humanizing in him that occurred as a result of their love for one another and their art.

We see, then, that the only irremediable sin is the sin against hope. And what makes a good man is precisely his ability to change when confronted with love. Here, as in Fiddler on the Roof, we see the revolutionary power of love. And yet it is revolutionary not in the abstract, unsubstantializable way in which communism was, but rather in a concrete, incarnate sense. It is the love between one woman and one man that changes the life of another person. It is revolution, then, in the particular, as connected to and defined by the truth about the person, that is held up for us as a model.