Over the weekend I finally got around to watching The Lives Of Others. Because it’s in German, with English subtitles, I couldn’t do crosswords while I watched it, which is what I normally do while watching movies at home. And so it had a much firmer grip on my attention than most movies viewed at home (on the warbly old eighties-vintage television bequeathed to me by one friend, while I lie on the surprisingly comfortable IKEA sofa bequeathed to me by another, in the comfort nook of my apartment, late at night, under a couple of blankets, crosswords in my lap) and, partly because of this and partly just due to the film’s tremendous impact, I found myself overwhelmed.

The Lives Of Others is one of those movies that makes it look easy to make excellent movies. Watching it, you wonder how anyone could ever make a bad movie, since this one is so effortlessly, organically good. But the effect is deceptive, I know, and I’ll never be a filmmaker but I know that when I’m reading a truly good piece of writing, it has a similarly effortless, assured quality, and I want to look under the hood to see how it’s done but of course there’s no latch to release the hood. You can’t even see the lines where the hood opens, or the stitching in the seams, or whatever other clumsy artisinal analogy I could make here. So it’s frustrating even as it’s inspiring. But I’ll take it.

It is a refreshing film in part because of its unabashed sincerity—its characters say things like “he was a good man” without winking at the camera or meaning anything other than what they’re literally saying. It occurs to me that I don’t see a lot of this in film these days, especially in American cinema, especially in this Age of Irony.

But what I really found moving about this film is that I almost immediately recognized it as the sort of film my father would have loved. In fact, I’m so confident that he would have loved it that I’m sure—if the laws governing space and time were different—he would have shown it during the humanities survey he used to teach, a class called Can Beauty Save The World?, which essentially looked at different instances in human history when art has emerged in the midst of struggle, and even terror, to serve as a balm, if not an antidote, to those forces. Because he was a Russian professor, he was especially interested in the moments—and as anyone can tell you, they are legion and emblematic—when colossally talented artistic forces collided, repeatedly and forcefully, against socialism and communism and poverty and tyranny. He had a way of framing it and teaching it (from what I’ve heard) so that all of the corniness or naivete (or, for that matter, the kind of irony of which The Lives of Others is also so refreshingly devoid) we might associate with the topic was stripped away until it would take a truly hardened cynic to find fault with the thesis. It’s a kind of intellectual hat trick I can only dream of pulling off, even if I live to teach for many decades.

But so anyway, the moment in the film when I came to this problematic and emotionally fraught realization I began detailing at the beginning of the previous paragraph before veering wildly off course involves a piano and some music and a few very carefully written lines of dialogue, and the combination of the three is yet another hat trick of the sort we only find in truly inspired filmmaking, the kind that helps us remember why we bother watching movies in the first place. It is the film’s emotional and thematic core, the fulcrum upon which the plot and its main characters pivot. Every truly great film or book (and maybe even, one could argue, piece of music) has such a fulcrum.

“Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?”

Gabriel Yared - “Die Sonate vom Guten Menschen” (mp3)