Allegedly, when Stephen Frears learned that many Americans viewed The Queen - the story of a leader with a profound disconnect from her subjects - as an allegory for the Bush presidency, he was both shocked and a little confused that we'd be so anxious to appropriate a story that, to the director, was so essentially steeped in its Englishness. With that in mind, I have to wonder what Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the director and writer of the much-awarded The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) thinks about the reception his film has received stateside.

After all, for an American, it's impossible not to see the film as a mirror: it's the story of a country under surveillance, where every moment of wrong thinking is documented in a great big file, and where you're a presumptive enemy of the state until you can prove that you're not. Not that I want to steal another country's history or anything, but except for the year and the language, it's pretty easy to imagine this exact script being directed into a cautionary fable right here in these United States, if only these United States had better and braver filmmakers.

East Germany, 1984: the Cold War is in full swing, and Captain Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is a proud and efficient member of the secret police, a specialist in interrogation and spying. One day, he encounters Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), an ideologically pure playwright, and this being an Iron Curtain country, paranoia rules the day, and Wiesler recommends putting this too-good-to-be-true author under the microscope. And who better to conduct the surveillance than Wiesler himself?

No country does art about the psychic scars of the 20th Century quite like Germany, because let's face it: no Western country had such a rough go of things for most of that time. And on the level of pure historical inquiry, The Lives of Others is among the best of the best. The minutiae of living under totalitarianism is fuller here than in any of the similar films that have made it to this side of the Atlantic, which is a bit of a pleasant surprise given that Henckel von Donnersmarck (a name that will never get boring to type, not if I had to do it a thousand times) grew up in the West, including the US. Every conversation is suffused with the knowledge that some things are wrong things to say, even when the frilliest, most apolitical topics are under debate. Dreyman is the sole loyalist in a circle of semi-radical artists (the real radicals all having been imprisoned or otherwise removed), and every discussion he has, be it about alcohol or Brecht or actors, takes on the overtones of a political litmus test.

The DDR is a suffocating, lifeless place, in other words, and Henckel von Donnersmarck makes that clear by using one of the most limited palates I have ever seen in a modern color film. There are greys and there are browns and there is precious little else. A mechanical, lifeless look for a mechanical, lifeless world. There's been a steady stream of films about life in the former East Germany ever since the Wall fell, some of them fairly evocative in their precision of detail (Volker Schlöndorf's The Legend of Rita and Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! both spring to mind), but none quite so overwhelmingly bleak. More than any film I have seen (and I have certainly not seen them all), The Lives of Others captures the unending joylessness of East German life not just in its plot but in its oppressive appearance.

If that's all there was to the film, I'd probably love it for about six hours, and promptly forget about it, just like I did with the above-mentioned tales of life in the East. It is thus a happy thing that The Lives of Others ties its story of grey life under the Soviet thumb to the story of a grey little man who prospers, briefly, under that thumb. This is not ultimately the story of Georg Dreyman, it is the story of Wiesler, and the private hell he creates for himself during his surveillance. At the same time, it is still uniquely a story of East Germany, for the bloodless functionary's life that Wiesler leads could only exist in a country with the rules and bureaucracy and paranoia to be found in that place, and his story proves to be a much more original and effective indictment of the police state than a simple tale of poor people getting screwed by the SS could ever be.

Wiesler, we quickly learn, has no life of his own. He spends little to no time in his nearly-empty apartment, he has no apparent friends, and his social world extends only as far as the Party events where he is obligated to put in an appearance. Thus, the gregarious and bohemian life of Dreyman and his radical friends - in particular, his lusty and playful relationship with actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) - inspires shock and envy to the SS man in his grim little hidey-hole of microphones and video cameras. We begin to see this early on, when Wiesler leads a team into Dreyman's apartment to set up wiring; this is a space full of well-worn books and lived-in furniture, and while we have not yet seen Wiesler's sterile, anonymous home, it is obvious from the way he walks around staring that this life is something he has not previously considered possible.

The very phrase, "the lives of others," points out that this is to be a story of voyeurism. But it is not a kind of voyeurism very often seen in the cinema. If this were an American film, or even a French one, you can bet that Wiesler would derive an erotic charge from listening to Dreyman and Sieland making love, and it is the case that he eventually becomes aroused enough to require the help of a prostitute. But eros is not Henckel von Donnersmarck's primary interest, and it becomes increasingly clear that Wiesler's chief desire is to have Dreyman's life of passion and energy. Throughout the film, Wiesler is clad in grey and kept in grey rooms with little light; Dreyman is in a multicolored, dappled space with heavy significance laid upon certain colorful objects in his world: a yellow book, red ink. Through spying on Dreyman, Wiesler learns the joy of having a meaningful life.

This next paragraph contains a spoiler, if you don't know what happened in 1989 in Germany. In the opening of the film, Wiesler teaches a class on the proper techniques of interrogation. As part of his lecture, he plays a tape of himself with a prisoner, and we cut constantly between the classroom and the interrogation room, blurring the distinction between the man and the machine playing his words. Because Wiesler is a machine: he gets no joy out of his work, nor does he share his supervisor's delight in the game of promotions. He is in the SS because he is very good at it. At the end of the film, nearly five years after his surveillance of Dreyman, he has been moved to another job where he has to interact with a mechanical device; but when he hears the news of the reunification of Berlin, he simply stops what he's doing and walks away, succinctly breaking his contact with the mechanical world of East Germany, where men are cogs. It is a moment, we feel, that he has been waiting for patiently, and he gives not a moment's thought to claiming his humanity in that moment. This is what Dreyman has given to him.

Spoiler ends.

It's pretty much a perfect story about man and Party and the loss of self, right up until it isn't anymore. And it isn't because of a terribly ill-conceived ending that keeps going on and on: not a false ending, exactly, for there was never a moment where I expected it to stop and it didn't. In fact, when it does end it's more of a petering-out than a finale. There's a cloying, punny final line, and then the shot freezes and cuts to the credits, and there's no closure, but also a lot of baggage; the film needed to end fifteen minutes earlier or five minutes later.

The ending also achieves something that I think I've never seen: nested flash-forwards. From 1985, it's suddenly 1989, it's suddenly 1992, and then at last it's 1994. After the precise and deliberate pacing ofthe first two hours, in which every moment counted, the wheel-spinning at the end is worse than a disaster. It's easily explained, by recognizing that this is Henckel von Donnersmarck's first feature (he fled film school in late 2001 at the age of 28, apparently chafing under the dictatorship of short films, to which I say: rock on, my brother), and he had an unwillingness to shave off any of his ideas. God knows I've been there. But that doesn't make it okay. The end is pure nonsense, and while it doesn't come close to undoing the brilliance of the film that precedes it, there's still a palpable deflating of the film. This could have been a true masterpiece, but we'll have to settle for an exceptionally gifted near-miss.