Martina Gedeck makes capable women feel vulnerable without asking us to find them endearing. We rate her ability to make us uncomfortable, especially when a film such as The Lives of Others is working hard to reassure us.
Fi1m perspective
In The Lives of Others (2006), Martina Gedeck makes Christa-Maria Sieland’s vulnerability uncomfortable to watch. We felt uneasy because she gave us so little encouragement to turn that vulnerability into easy sympathy. She lets us care about someone under pressure without making the process pleasant. We rate that restraint, particularly in a film which occasionally tries too hard to settle our feelings for us. Gedeck makes Sieland feel like someone we cannot entirely understand simply by recognising her distress.
Her international breakthrough came with Mostly Martha (2001), playing the chef Martha Klein after establishing herself in German cinema during the 1990s. The capable professional who is also vulnerable proved a good fit for her precise, unmannered acting. The Lives of Others and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), in which she played Ulrike Meinhof, brought wider recognition. The solo Alpine drama The Wall (2012) followed. These are substantial parts, but their seriousness should not obscure her work in comedy.
In The Lives of Others, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck benefits from the difference between Gedeck and Sebastian Koch, who plays the playwright Dreyman. Koch gives him an ease that keeps him from becoming merely an emblem of resistance. Gedeck is less reassuring, and together they make the relationship feel worth attending to before we consider what surveillance can do to it. Donnersmarck sometimes undermines that work by making decency too easy to locate. We are left with too little uncertainty about people whom the actors have worked to make complicated.
There is a risk of treating an intelligent woman in distress as Gedeck’s default part. Her work across comedy, drama and thrillers ought to discourage that habit. We would welcome more parts that ask for her humour as well as her ability to make pressure felt. For a first encounter, choose The Lives of Others, provided a reassuring performance is not what the evening calls for.
Biography
Martina Gedeck is a German actress. She was born in Munich and moved to Berlin as a child. After studying German literature and history at the Free University of Berlin, she trained in acting at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1982 to 1986.
She began her career in theatre, appearing at venues including the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt. Her film work includes the lead role of Martha Klein in Mostly Martha (2001), Christa-Maria Sieland in The Lives of Others (2006), and Ulrike Meinhof in The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).
Gedeck has received multiple German Film Awards, including for Best Actress in Mostly Martha and Best Supporting Actress in Life is All You Get (1997). She is married to Swiss director Markus Imboden and lives in Berlin.
