Having hit the moral crossroads, he resolves, at great risk to himself, to save the playwright and keep the lovers together. Tragically, the actress dies out of guilt. The film reaches its end — which is at once heartbreaking and redeeming — with the playwright discovering that he had been saved by the Stasi agent and the ex-spy (for by now the communist regime is gone and the two Germanys are reunited) discovering that the latest book by the person whom he spied on has been dedicated to him.

At one level, the film is about the most momentous events in the latter half of the last century — the rise and fall of Berlin Wall, the birth and death of communist states that propounded a noble ideal but self-destructed by turning into police states, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s humane revolution through glasnost and perestroika, leading to the end of the Cold War. At another, deeper level, it is about the eternal drama of human life, when men and women confront the call of their conscience in myriad situations.

The greatness of young German director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (he is only 35), is that he has employed the power of subtlety and insight to create a movie that runs like a spell-binding novel on the screen. Even if you have appreciated it only in its English subtitles, at the end of watching it you wonder: “Can cinema be so good?”

One reason why I am so stirred and shaken by the film is that, all through the 1970s and the 1980s, I was myself a devoted communist and believed in all the propaganda emanating from the Soviet Union, East Germany and other parts of the ‘socialist heaven’. It would be interesting to see how Comrades Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury, whose party (of which I was once an activist) never used to utter a word those days about the dehumanising conduct of the police states in Moscow and Berlin, would react to The Lives of Others when it is screened in Indian cities.