apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Now that you bring this up, I remember the fabulous interiors and exteriors in the film. The playwrite's apartment was sumptuous, if shabby. Indeed, his love life was also profound and to be envied. The poor Stasi man's apartment was everything the playwrite's was not. It was plain and socialist ordinary. His love life....well...not much there.

I did also like the attic listening room.

I need to watch this again tonight.

This is an incredible film, in part a cautionary tale about the vague lines between security, control, and power that manages not to hit you over the head with it's "message." It's also a love story, and a story about redemption. It's subtle, beautiful, heartbreaking, alarming, melancholy, and an armful of other emotions all rolled up into one.

The only apartment I've seen that's more sterile and creepy than the Stasi guy is the Jersey apartment of Lara Flynn Boyle (or Phillip Seymour Hoffman) in "Happiness". Ugh!

I've been wanting to see this film, thanks for the prod.

Amazing film - with a gorgeous apartment, you're so right. I think it was key for the apartment to feel like a refuge, a true home, in order for the violation of that refuge to be effective. Their designers and decorators did a great job.

I hears that von Wotisname spent years replicating the look of East Germany in those years-the paint colors, the furniture styles--and in my view succeeded brilliantly. I spent a year in Moscow in the seventies and this film took me right back to the barren aesthetic of those institutional spaces, and the often surprising comfort, even opulence, of some private apartments.

I love that you sent out an AT email based on being inspired by a movie... more like this please!
This movie is on my netflix (added after seeing the male lead in 'The Black Book'), but I think I'll move it up the list!

I absolutely love this movie. I haven't had a movie hit me emotionally like this in a while. I've seen it twice now and it's weird how at first you are creeped out by the spying but then become obsessed with their lives just like the Stasi man.

I just watched this movie last week. It's wonderful and heartbreaking.

The spaces are very memorable. Loved the contrast of the writer's warm home to the stasi guy's institutional apartment. Very well done.

I've seen it three times; music plays almost exclusively during scenes in the writer's apartment.

I agree. This was an amazing movie. The very first moment we saw the glimmer in the eyes of the Stasi man change was incredible. And when the author decided not to thank him personally - because it wasn't enough.

Brilliant is all ways. Interiors, acting, music, suspense. Great film. I became obsessed with the floorboard....