A winner of the Golden Bear at BIFF, Barbara takes The Lives Of Others’ austere, cold storytelling and takes it down a notch to even colder depths. This 1980-based drama is all about stealth but take too long doing anything and you'll lose your audience.
When she requests a travel visa, Barbara (Hoss), a doctor, is banished to a small countryside clinic where she is under constant surveillance by local Stasi officer Schutz (Block). He has roped in her new colleague, the handsome André (Zherfeld) to help keep an eye on her but it looks like the Stasi's suspicions are way off as Barbara keeps herself to herself. However, when she receives a package of money from her Western-based lover, who secretly flits back and forth across the border to inform her of the plans to sneak her out of East Germany, Barbara puts her plans to defect into action. But life in the country begins to eat away at her dreams of escape. Barbara wasn't expecting a connection with the pregnant teenager Stella (Bauer), and later Mario (Jannick Schumann), who both fall under her care in the clinic.
Nor was she expecting to be attracted to André. When she finds him administering painkillers to Schutz's wife, she asks him if helping everyone means helping "assholes". His answer of ‘yes’ seems to rock her to the core. She enjoys his honesty and that he makes ratatouille; traditionally a simple peasant's dish with ingredients plucked from his garden. She begins to wonder what the advantages of living on the other side of the border would have to offer her, especially when her lover points out that when she escapes she won't have to work because he earns enough for both of them. Her decision making, how her mind works, is always interesting but the low-key plotting can only keep interest high for so long.
In taking his time to place doubt in Barbara's mind, Petzold makes the transition believable but the running time is felt as a result. There is a hump in the second act that Barbara can't get over and the slow-moving drama grinds to a halt. Interest wanes. Keeping the audience in the dark and only slipping out the most necessary of information can keep us guessing but when the meat n' veg of any film, the second act, needs something to kick it on, some info on the characters is needed to see us through. Without that, because we’ve so little to go on, there's a lot of hanging around until the plot cranks up again.
Petzold is after this alienation, he wants to highlight the isolation of the characters from not only the outside world and the rest of East Germany, but also themselves. This is fine but it's to the detriment of the audience's sympathy.