The bad old days of the Berlin Wall and the Big Brother tactics of the GDR secret police, the Stasi. The case in point: a Party pooh-bah has the hots for a celebrated stage actress and, to clear the way, orders some dirt dug up on her playwright boyfriend, an apparently loyal socialist of spotless reputation despite his openly subversive friends and despite, too, his openly snooty manner. Ulrich Tukur, so memorable as the conscience-stricken Nazi of Amen, is good again in the less complex and less sympathetic role of the bureaucratic brownnoser who heads up the investigation. But the better role and better performance belong to another Ulrich, last name Mühe, coincidentally the conscienceless Doctor Mengele of Amen, now playing the relentless bullet-headed interrogator charged to carry out the dirty work, taking it all in (including the indiscretions of the higher-ups), giving nothing away, keeping his opinions to himself, eventually keeping his findings to himself as well, crawling a long way out on a limb. Martina Gedeck and Sebastian Koch as actress and playwright have some complexity, too, to complement and compromise their outward artiness. Watching it all unfold is more than passably interesting, if not particularly to look at (nauseously green), and even though the run-on epilogue is rather cumbersome. The new-name filmmaker bears a name befitting the monocle-brandishing antagonist in a Viennese operetta, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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