Sonata for a Good Man

‘The Lives of Others’ tells a story of a secret policeman and a playwright in East Germany, in 1980s. The policeman has been ordered to spy on the writer and reports his daily life. He began on spying and does it every day and night, but during this job he becomes interested in the writer and tries to save his life by reporting false events.

The beginning minutes of the movie – which was honored as the best foreign language movie at this year’s Academy Awards (Oscar) – portraits a serious intelligence service officer who believes in his job and duty, with no emotions and respect to humanity. So choosing him as the devil part of the story is the easiest thing you can do in the first 10 minutes. Specially when he sleeps with a prostitute and asks her to stay more beside him, nobody will feel sorrow for the police officer. But you will blame yourself for this at the end of the story! The policeman shows his real nature during the movie.

The story is so sad; thinking about the lives of people that are being wasted by some dictators is so annoying and watching a woman who sleeps with a government to protect her man, is not an interesting thing. But the hope and honesty you find in the main characters make you happy. When at the end of the movie, a colleague tells to the policeman about the Berlin’s Wall fall, and he leaves his job and goes out, you can feel how much he is happy. You can feel he has been freed. Even if you’ve known that a lot of lives have been murdered during those years.

At the first half of the movie, the writer plays a song for his friend who has hanged himself. After that he says to his girlfriend, “Can someone who's listened to this music, really listened, still be a bad person?”
And we know that there’s a police officer who has really listened to this music.